Twin blasts targeting police in restive cities in northern Iraq on Sunday left seven policemen dead and nine people injured, including six civilians, according to security officials, the dpa reported.
In the first incident, a car bomb hit a police patrol in Duluiyah in Salahaddin province, killing seven policemen and injuring three, local security sources told the Voices of Iraq VOI news agency.
Three other policemen were injured in the attack.
The car, parked on the side of the road, was detonated when the patrol drove by on its way to secure a main road, the sources said.
In the other blast in Kirkuk, six civilians were injured by a bomb that targeted the car of the city's emergency police chief, VOI cited security sources as saying.
General Ahmed Shamirani was not in the car during the blast in Kirkuk, 250 kilometres north of Baghdad.
Salahaddin and Kirkuk are the scene of spiralling violence committed by Sunni insurgents, who are believed to be regrouping in some parts of northern Iraq after they were driven out of Baghdad and surrounding areas.
The Iraqi army had announced on Saturday it would suspend its security sweeps and arrests for the next 10 days in Tikrit, the capital of Salahhadin, Kirkuk and Mosul.
The move aims at giving armed groups in those areas a deadline to surrender and give up their arms, the commander of the 4th division of the Iraqi army, General Abdallah al-Dalawi, told VOI.
The general did not say whether big-scale offensives, like the ones launched in the south, would be mounted after the deadline expires.
Iraqi government troops backed by the US military launched offensives against Shiite militias in the southern provinces of Basra and Maysan and the Shiite-dominated district of Sadr City in eastern Baghdad.