A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol exploded in an outdoor market in Baghdad on Saturday, killing four people and wounding 27, police said.

An Iraqi carries his 9-year old niece Ibtisam Mahmoud, away from the hospital after she was wounded by a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol in an outdoor market that killed four people and wounded some 26 others, in Baghdad, Iraq, Saturday, June 10, 2006. [AP]

The victims were all civilians as the explosion missed the police patrol in the al-Sadriya market, police Lt. Ali Mitaab and Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said. The market is in a Shiite-Sunni Arab neighborhood in central Baghdad.

The violence came after Iraqi authorities imposed a four-hour driving ban Friday in Baghdad to prevent reprisals after the killing of al-Qaida's top deputy in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A similar ban remains in effect in the volatile Diyala province northeast of Baghdad.

Gunmen in two cars also shot to death a Shiite metal worker and wounded two others in their shop in western Baghdad, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

A mortar landed on a house elsewhere in the capital, seriously wounding a 50-year-old woman and a 2-year-old girl, Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said.

A gunfight broke out between Iraqi soldiers and gunmen in the northern city of Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, killing two people, including a Syrian truck driver caught in the crossfire, police Abdul-Hamid al-Jubouri said.

He also said gunmen in two cars killed three Shiite butchers near a central bus station in Mosul.