Three killed in Baghdad mortar barrage

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Three people were killed and 15 wounded when a barrage of mortars landed near Baghdad's international airport on Monday, the Iraqi military said.

It was one of the deadliest mortar bomb attacks on a residential area of Baghdad in months.

Major-General Qassim Moussawi, spokesman for Iraq's military in Baghdad, said the bombs hit an area in the mainly Sunni Khadhra district to the west of the airport in the south of the city.

Police said they were fired from a neighbouring Shi'ite area. Moussawi said five suspects were arrested.

The U.S. military says "special groups", the term it uses to describe rogue elements in the Mehdi Army militia of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, are now usually responsible for mortar attacks in Baghdad.

On Sunday, U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith said there was evidence that these groups, which Washington says are backed by Iran, were increasingly using secret weapons stores to attack U.S. and Iraqi forces.

Smith said 212 weapons caches were found in the last week, including two discovered in Baghdad which he said had "growing links to Iranian-backed special groups".

David Satterfield, the U.S. State Department's Iraq coordinator, said last week Iran was "intent on continuing to promote violence within Iraq". Tehran denies such accusations.

Mortar attacks used to be an almost daily occurrence in the capital as rival Shi'ite and Sunni fighters bombarded each other's communities.