BAGHDAD , (AP) — Eleven people, including a woman, died in violence across Iraq on Wednesday as officials said a teenage girl has been jailed for trying to copy her father and brother and be a suicide bomber.

In the deadliest of the day’s attacks, a roadside bomb exploded as policemen were travelling by car through a market in the southern Baghdad neighbourhood of Dora, killing five of them, police said.

A further eight people were wounded, including three policemen, in a blast in the predominantly Sunni district, a police official told AFP, requesting anonymity.

In the restive city of Mosul, 370 kilometres (230 miles) north of Baghdad, one policeman was killed when three gunmen in a car opened fire on a police checkpoint in the north of the city and then fled the scene.

The armed trio then moved on to a second checkpoint in the area, which had been informed of the violence nearby, and entered a gun battle with police there.

Two of the three gunmen were killed in the clashes, while a third was injured and arrested by police.

A man who worked at a pharmaceutical factory in Mosul was killed and two other people injured after a “sticky bomb” attached to their car exploded on a road 10 kilometres north of the town, a local policeman said.

In the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which is plagued by tensions among its Kurdish, Turkmen and Arab communities, a 23 year-old Turkmen house painter was kidnapped by unidentified people in a car and then killed half an hour later, police said.

A car bomb Wednesday morning in Ramadi, 100 kilometres west of the capital, killed a woman and wounded four other people, including two policemen, a local police official said.

Raniya Ibrahim, an Iraqi teenage girl caught moments before blowing herself up in a suicide bomb attack, has been sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, a Justice Ministry official told AFP on Wednesday.

“Diyala juvenile court sentenced her to seven and a half years in prison on Tuesday, but it is subject to appeal,” ministry spokeswoman Ahlam al-Tamami said.

Aged 15 at the time, Ibrahim was arrested in August last year wearing a vest packed with 20 kilogrammes (44 pounds) of explosives and preparing to blow herself up in the busy market in the town of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad.

The attack was mapped out by her husband and other Al-Qaeda members but police officers managed to foil the plan and arrest the girl, investigators said.

Her husband, whom she married aged 14, is a suspected Al-Qaeda militant thought to be behind 40 murders, the majority of which were decapitations.

Ibrahim’s father and brother were both suicide bombers.

Violence in Iraq as a whole has dropped off markedly in recent months, but attacks against security forces and civilians are common in the capital and Mosul.

The number of violent deaths in Iraq fell by a third from the June figure of 437 to 275 in July, the first month local forces have been in charge of security in urban areas since the US-led invasion in 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The figure in May was 155, the lowest of any month since American troops arrived.