4 killed in bombings in Iraq's Kurdistan

At least four people were killed and some 29 wounded in bomb explosions in the city of Arbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous region of Kurdistan on Sunday, a Kurdish official said. "We have at least four people killed and 29 wounded by the blasts," the region's Health Minister Rekawt Hama Rasheed told reporters. The first blast took place in the afternoon when a booby- trapped car parked near the Kurdish security headquarters, locally known as Asaiysh forces, in the 60th Street thoroughfare in Arbil, some 350 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, a local security source told Xinhua. At least three more blasts and heavy gunfire followed the first explosion, as the security forces blocked the roads leading to the scene, the source said. The last major attack in the region took place on May 4, 2005, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the local office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which also served as Arbil's police recruiting center. The attack killed 60 people and wounded some 160 others. Unlike other parts of Iraq, the Kurdistan autonomous region has been relatively calm during the years that followed the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2003.