Bombings around Iraq kill 14, including a child near school

BAGHDAD —  Bombings Tuesday killed 14 Iraqis, including a child hit by a blast outside his primary school in the northern city of Mosul, police said.

Students were leaving the school when a bomb in a wooden cart detonated, killing the pupil, along with a 2-year-old girl and two adults at an adjacent market. The 12 people injured included students.

In a second attack, a roadside bomb targeting an army patrol killed five soldiers in Hillah, south of Baghdad, police and a witness said.

“It hit the first vehicle. The whole thing exploded and burned,” witness Ali Jubouri said.

In the northern city of Tall Afar, a car bomb killed five people and wounded 30, including five children, a senior medic in the city’s main hospital said.

The violence came on a day when Saddam Hussein’s cousin Ali Hassan Majid received a second death sentence, this one for crushing a Shiite uprising after Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Majid, known as “Chemical Ali,” muttered “thanks be to God” as chief judge Mohammed Oreibi Khalifa declared him guilty and sentenced him.

Majid was sentenced to death on a conviction last year for his role in the killing of tens of thousands of Kurds in a crackdown in the late 1980s. Chemical weapons were used against civilians in that attack.

Meanwhile, the United Nations expressed concern Tuesday about overcrowding and “grave human rights violations” of detainees in Iraqi custody -- in one case, 123 men crammed into a single 540-square-foot cell.

“There is no secret that the prisons are overcrowded and frankly not in very good condition,” U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura said at a news conference where the findings were released.

Reports of widespread mistreatment and torture of detainees also continue, and a thorough investigation is needed, he said.