Middle Orient

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A car bomb killed nine people and wounded 13 in the Bayaa district of southern Baghdad on Sunday, police said.The bomb exploded in a car parked on a busy commercial street in Bayaa, a mainly Shi’ite area, police said, adding the death toll could rise.

Hundreds of Iraqi Christians have reportedly fled the northern Iraqi city of Mosul over the past week, following a wave of killings aimed against them.

TEHRAN (FNA)- Turkey’s Energy Minister Hilmi Guler said Friday negotiations to finalize a contract for the purchase of Iran’s natural gas still continue, adding that he would “visit Tehran to sign the agreement as soon as it is finalized”.

The blast struck a market in Abu Dshir, a mainly Shia enclave in the predominantly Sunni district of Dora, in the south of the Iraqi capital. Several shops were reported to have been destroyed by the explosion and vehicles set on fire.

Turkish jets have bombed suspected Kurdish insurgents in northern Iraq, the army says. The raid, which also involved artillery attacks, comes just days after Turkey’s parliament voted to extend cross-border raids into Iraq for another year.

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian scholars Sadeq Hosseini Eshkevari and Akbar Irani will participate in a conference on Islamic manuscripts that will be held in Istanbul on October 10 and 11.

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran’s Tourism Information Office was inaugurated in Istanbul, Turkey in a ceremony attended by deputy head of Cultural Iran’s Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization’s Investment and Projects Department, Mehdi Jahangiri.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Palestinian Islamists in Gaza are stalling on an Egyptian plan to reconcile them with the secular PLO leadership in the West Bank, a senior official of the rival Fatah faction said on Thursday.

An Iraqi MP from the bloc of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has died in a roadside bombing in Baghdad.

At least three police officers and a civilian have been killed in an attack in Diyarbakir in south-eastern Turkey. Unidentified assailants reportedly opened fire on a police bus on the ouskirts of the mainly Kurdish city. 22 other people, mainly trainee officers, have been injured.