Tuesday, December 28 2004 18:54 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Samarra (Iraq): At least 28 people were killed in a string of attacks on Iraqi security forces today (Dec 28, 2004), after Osama bin Laden declared wanted Jordanian Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his "emir" in the country.

In an audiotape purportedly recorded by the al-Qaeda leader, bin Laden also said all those who took part in next month's Iraqi elections would be "infidels," raising the stakes in the run-up to the January 30 vote.

In one of a series of apparently coordinated strikes in Sunni Muslim strongholds north of Baghdad, insurgents stormed a police station in Dijla between Tikrit and Samarra and gunned down 12 policemen, police said.

"Armed men took control of the police station and executed 12 policemen, three of them officers," one police source said, adding that the attackers then dynamited the building. Just outside Tikrit, the hometown of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, three policemen were killed in an attack on a checkpoint while another four policeman and a national guardsmen were shot dead at a police station in Ishaki, south of the restive town of Samarra.

Another three guardsmen and three civilians were killed in a car bomb attack targeting a US-Iraq military convoy in Samarra, hospital sources said.

In Baghdad a suicide bomber was killed and six people wounded in an attacks against the convoy of an Iraqi national guard general Modher Abud as he was leaving his home, the Interior Ministry said.