This latest sign that the Iraqi crisis is far from over came as a gang stormed the offices of Al Shaabiya TV and slaughtered staff, including the general manager Abdel Rahim Al Nasrawi, a minor Shiite politician.
"We came in this morning and we saw the massacre. All were killed. We think gunmen broke into the house and killed them," said a journalist from the private satellite network, who asked not to be identified.
Iraqi security officials confirmed that there had been an attack on the station's premises, a converted house in downtown Baghdad.
Nasrawi runs a small and little-known political party and his satellite channel has not yet started broadcasting. There was no word from staff or authorities as to why it should have been attacked.
A coordinated pair of bomb attacks killed at least five people and injured 10 more in a busy square in central Baghdad, security sources said.
The blasts rattled windows a kilometer (half-a-mile) away and a plume of dust and smoke rose from the city skyline from Tayaran Square.
One police officer was killed and three wounded in the attack, security officials said, suggesting that the blasts had targeted security forces working for Iraq's US-backed government.
The attackers first triggered a car bomb then detonated a roadside booby trap in the immediate aftermath of the first blast, in a bid to maximize casualties, security officials said.
Three more people, including another policeman, died when a booby-trapped motorcycle exploded as officers examined it. Ten bystanders and five police were injured, a security official said.
Meanwhile, police continued to collect the bodies of murder victims slain in Baghdad's sectarian dirty war between rival Sunni and Shiite death squads. A US military spokeswoman said that 16 corpses had been found so far Thursday.
The military also announced the death of another US soldier, bringing the number killed since the start of the month to 41 and since the US-led invasion of March 2003 to 2,750.
The US military has 142,000 soldiers deployed in Iraq, supporting the coalition government of Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki and battling the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias pushing the country toward civil war.
In Washington, army chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker confirmed that contingency plans were being drawn up to have enough troops ready to maintain current force levels in Iraq until 2010.
Schoomaker said that the army had scheduled troop rotations "at exactly what we have today" through the next four years, but said that the actual number deployed will depend on conditions on the ground.
"This is not a prediction that things are going poorly or better," he told reporters. "It's just that I have to have enough ammo in the magazine that I can continue to shoot as long as they want us to shoot."
A few months ago US officials predicted that some of the 15 combat brigades deployed in Iraq would be able to come home by the end of the year, but since then mounting sectarian violence seems to have forced a rethink.
© 2006 Agence France-Presse