A suicide bomber opened fire on worshippers during Friday prayers at a mosque in northern Iraq and then blew himself up after running out of ammunition, killing 12 people, police and hospital officials said. The attacker walked into the Sunni mosque in Tal Afar and started firing on worshippers with an AK-47 rifle as the imam was delivering his sermon, a local police official said. Sixty-five people were wounded in the attack. When the shooter ran out of ammunition, he detonated his explosives belt, the official said. The imam, Abdul-Satar Hassan, a member of Iraq's largest Sunni political party, was also killed in the attack, the official said. It was not immediately clear if the slain imam was the intended victim, although Sunni clerics have increasingly become targets in Iraq's sectarian bloodletting. Sahir Jalal, 37, who was at the mosque for prayers, said the imam had just begun delivering a sermon when a tall man stood up. “Then he took out a small rifle from under his jacket and started to shoot,” he said. Seconds later, the man detonated explosives strapped to his body, Jalal said. An official with the Tal Afar hospital confirmed the casualty count. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information to the media. Last week, a Sunni cleric driving home after delivering a sermon in Saqlawiyah, 75 kilometers northwest of Baghdad, was killed by a bomb attached to his car. Earlier this week, the cleric who leads the biggest Sunni mosque in Baghdad was wounded in a similar bombing. A Sunni cleric in Mosul was killed in September, also by a bomb attached to his car. – APTal Afar is about 60 kilometers northwest of Mosul. While violence in Iraq has dropped dramatically since the height of the insurgency, the area in and around Mosul is considered one of the last strongholds of the Sunni-backed insurgency and the scene of some horrific bombings recently. Tal Afar, a mostly Turkoman city, is located along one of the major smuggling routes from Syria to Mosul and has gone through cycles of stability and instability for years. The Sunni majority at one time had an alliance with the Shiite police to battle Sunni insurgents and their allies. __
