Suicide Blast Kills 28 Iraqi Policemen

BAGHDAD, Oct. 29 — A suicide bomber on a bicycle killed 28 policemen in Baquba today as they prepared for their morning training routine, Iraqi authorities said. The blast also wounded 20 other people, including seven policemen who were severely injured and a woman and her baby, the authorities said.

The attack was one of the deadliest on Iraqi security forces in some time. No group took immediate credit. But the episode suggested that Sunni Arab guerrillas, who as recently as last spring controlled Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, continue to have the support to carry out devastating attacks that strike at the heart of efforts to bring the perpetually unstable city under control.

Wisam Wahid al-Majmaie, a Sunni policeman who lives in the Ghatoon neighborhood of Baquba, said that a few minutes before the blast he had been relaxing with his colleagues on the police force. I lost 12 friends who were with me having tea 30 minutes ago, he said.

American military officials have said that they had largely cleansed Baquba of militants during operations last summer, when a large force of soldiers swept through the city. But many of the insurgents were able to escape and flee north before the soldiers arrived, military officials said, and there are fears that as United States forces are drawn down in Baquba the militants will simply return.

On Sunday night, 10 tribal sheiks from Baquba who had been working with the Iraqi government to defeat extremists were kidnapped as they left Baghdad for the drive back to Baquba. The sheiks — three Sunnis and seven Shiites — had just met with officials from the office of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki when they were kidnapped.

It was initially unclear who was responsible for the kidnapping, although The Associated Press reported that the United States military said today that a rogue Shiite militia leader was responsible.

The A.P. also reported today that the police had found the bullet-riddled body of one of the sheiks close to where the ambush took place. It quoted a police officer as saying that the victim was identified after his cellphone was found on him.

The kidnapping occurred in Shaab, a poor, predominantly Shiite neighborhood, and it showed the vulnerability of Sunnis and Shiites who are working to thwart extremism.

In southern Iraq, meanwhile, the American military today turned over security responsibilities to Iraqi authorities in the mainly Shiite province of Karbala, the eighth of the nations 18 provinces to revert to Iraqi control, the A.P. reported.

Regarding the tense situation in another region of Iraq — the border with Turkey — Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, indicated Sunday that behind-the-scenes efforts were under way to calm the situation. But he would not talk about them publicly because the situation was volatile.

I am not going to be saying anything about what we may be doing with our longtime NATO ally Turkey, although we clearly are doing things with them, General Petraeus said. Nor am I saying what were doing with our longtime Iraqi partners, he added.

Turkey and Iraq are at odds because Kurdish guerrillas who have taken refuge in the Qandeel mountains in the Kurdistan region in northern Iraq are using the area as a base for making raids into Turkey.

Last week, the guerrillas, part of the Kurdish Workers Party, or P.K.K., killed at least 12 Turkish soldiers and kidnapped several. That, with previous raids, led Turkey to threaten to invade northern Iraq to rout the guerrillas.

General Petraeus made the remarks to a handful of reporters after a change-of-command ceremony he attended at Camp Speicher, the military base five miles northwest of Tikrit that is the headquarters for American-led forces in northern Iraq.

Tensions between Iraq and Turkey have put the United States in an awkward position because Turkey is an ally and there are about 160,000 American troops in Iraq.

General Petraeus also made clear that despite reports describing Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a largely spent force, he viewed it as a continuing threat, though with reduced influence among Sunni Arabs in Baghdad over the past several months. The force is composed largely of Iraqi insurgents and is believed to be foreign-led, according to American intelligence sources, but its ties to Osama bin Laden are unclear at best.

The presence of Al Qaeda in a number of the key neighborhoods that they were in before — Amiriya, Adhamiya, Ghazaliya, Dora — has been significantly reduced and its actions degraded, General Petraeus said. He added that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia remained a very lethal enemy of Iraq and that the military must keep the pressure on very, very intensely.

With Al Qaeda in Mesopotamias activity reduced, General Petraeus said, it has been possible to see other problems more clearly, including criminal activities like extortion. He described the criminal influence in some areas of the capital as almost a mafia-type presence.

Alissa J. Rubin and Qais Mizher contributed reporting from Baghdad, and James Glanz from Camp Speicher.

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