String of attacks kill 19 people in Iraq

US Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the main architects of the invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, paid a surprise visit yesterday to Iraq, three days after the parliamentary election there, his office said.

Cheney's visit, his first to Iraq since the fall of Saddam's regime, included a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari.

The latest attacks, two of them suicide bombings, came after authorities eased stringent security measures put in place for the Oct. 15 parliamentary election and traffic returned to normal on the first full working day since the vote. A ban on vehicles was lifted and the country's borders reopened Saturday, although the frontier with Syria remained closed. Authorities said it would reopen in a few days, but did not give a reason for the delay.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, two relatives of an official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main Kurdish parties, were shot late Saturday as they walked near their house, police said. They were identified as Dhiab Hamad al-Hamdani and his son the uncle and nephew of party official Khodr Hassan al-Hamdani. The PUK is led by President Jalal Talabani.

In Baghdad on Sunday, a roadside bomb killed three police officers and wounded two. A similar attack on Saturday night killed one policeman and wounded two in the northern town of Tuz, 68 miles south of Kirkuk, police said.