Special report: Tension escalates in Iraq

    BAGHDAD, March 1 (Xinhua) -- A police chief of Iraq's northern city of Mosul said on Thursday that he survived a roadside bomb attack near his convoy, but one of his bodyguards was killed and another injured.

    "A roadside bomb went off near my convoy while we were passing an intersection in southern Mosul, killing one of my bodyguards and wounding another," Major General Wathiq al-Hamdani told Xinhua by telephone.

    Al-Hamdani said that he was heading to the western part of the city to oversee a search operation in the southern neighborhood of Hai Sumer.

    Several police vehicles were also damaged in the powerful blast, he said.

    Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, is the capital of the northern Nineveh province, the hotbed of insurgency and sectarian violence since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.