A car bomb exploded outside a police academy south of Baghdad during a graduation ceremony Wednesday, killing at least 20 people amid a surge in violence ahead of a landmark election. Hours earlier, another car bomb killed two Iraqis in the nation's capital. 

Also yesterday, six people were killed in the northern Iraqi city of Baquba in a suicide car bomb attack on security forces, and 13 people were wounded.

The bloodshed brought the death toll to more than 90 in the last four days. Despite the insurgency American and Iraqi leaders insist the vote will go forward as scheduled despite the violence aimed against holding the ballot.

"We will not allow the terrorists to stop the political process in Iraq," Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite leader, said yesterday. "The elections process is the basis for the deepening of the national unity in Iraq."

The explosion outside a gate of the police academy in Hillah, about 100 kilometers south of Baghdad, is the latest in a string of attacks against Iraqi security forces. Captain Hady Hatef said it killed at least 20 people and wounded unspecified number.

Allawi said the Iraqi security forces recently arrested two aides of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is believed to be leading the insurgency in Iraq.

"They were detained in Mosul along with three or four others and they have started confessing now to Iraqi security about the networks they run in order to harm our people," Allawi said.

Earlier yesterday, an explosives-filled car following a convoy of US and Iraqi troops detonated in Baghdad's western district of Amiriyah, killing two Iraqi civilians and wounding 10, police officials said. No troops were hurt.

In a third attack yesterday, gunmen killed Iraqi policeman Colonel Khalifa Hassan and his driver as they headed to work in the restive city of Baqoubah, 50 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, Doctor Ahmed Fouad of the Baqoubah General Hospital said.

Four Iraqi civilians were killed and two others injured when US soldiers opened fire after their convoy was attacked by rocket-propelled grenades in central Ramadi, 100 kilometers west of Baghdad, according to Doctor Riyad al-Hiti of the Ramadi Hospital. The US military had no immediate information about the incident.

The attacks have prompted Sunni Arab clerics to call for a boycott, and Iraq's largest Sunni political party announced it was pulling out of the race because of poor security.

However, gunmen have killed Omar Mahmoud Abdallah, a senior official of Iraq's main Sunni Muslim Party, who has written a number of books on Islam, the Iraqi Islamic Party said. He was snatched from his pharmacy in the northern city of Mosul and killed on Tuesday.

(China Daily January 6, 2005)