GUNMEN hijacked 12 minibuses and kidnapped up to 40 passengers outside Baghdad, while a car bomb left 15 people dead at a wedding party in the capital.

Up to ten gunmen stopped the convoy of minibuses on the dangerous road heading north into mixed Sunni and Shia farmlands, where there have been prolonged bouts of ethnic bloodletting in recent weeks.

The buses had left the main road to avoid an American checkpoint, an Interior Ministry official said, when they ran into a guerilla roadblock at Tarmiya, a well-known insurgent area.

Only the driver of one of the buses managed to escape. Most of the passengers were Shias heading to Balad, which Shia militiamen purged of Sunnis two weeks ago in revenge for the beheading of 17 local Shia men. Almost 100 people were murdered before US troops moved into the town, and Sunni militants vowed to avenge the dead.

In Baghdad, up to 15 people, including 4 children, died when a car bomb exploded outside a wedding party in the Shia district of Ur as the groom’s family arrived. Seven more people were wounded.The neighbourhood is close to the Shia area of Sadr City, where 33 people died the previous day in another car bombing. That attack was blamed on Sunni extremists trying to stoke further sectarian conflict by attacking the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the powerful militia of the Shia cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr.

The rebellious preacher won a political victory yesterday when Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Prime Minister, ordered US and Iraqis to lift their blockade of Sadr City, which had been sealed off in the hunt for a missing IraqiAmerican soldier. The soldier was kidnapped after slipping out of his base and meeting a woman he had secretly married, relatives said.

Elsewhere in Iraq, a roadside bomb killed a policeman and a civilian in Fallujah, west of Baghdad.

The bodies of five gunmen were found in an orchard near Suwayra, south of Baghdad, where there were clashes between gunmen and the police several days ago. In Baquba, western Iraq, the bodies of eight people were found, bound and gagged. All had been shot in the head.

In Najaf, 60 gunmen of the Mahdi Army are facing disciplinary action before an internal court for carrying out killings and forcing people to leave their homes.

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