Foreign security guards working for an undisclosed company have killed two Christian women in Baghdad and fled the scene. The women were riding in an Oldsmobile together with children and a third woman in the back. When their car approached the five-car convoy guarded by the private security firm, they threw a smoke bomb and killed the two women in the front of the car with shots to the head. The blood-splattered car had around 40 bullet holes.

According to the BBC, the dead women as Marou Awanis, 48, and Geneva Jalal, 30, both members of Iraq's small Christian minority. "These are innocent people killed by people who have no heart. The Iraqi people have no value to them," said a relative to AP. The children were unharmed, but the woman in the back was cut by flying glass.

An Iraqi government inquiry said personnel working for the US security firm Blackwater deliberately fired on Iraqi civilians, killing 17 on September 16. The Iraqi government demanded the security firm pay $8 million as compensation to each family bereaved by last month's shootings. However, this time the US Embassy said there's no link between itself and the security guards who killed the two innocent women.

"A security convoy of four-wheel drive vehicles opened fire on a white car at 2.30 pm (1130 GMT) killing two women," an interior ministry official said. "We have set strict mechanisms to control the behavior of the security companies and their conduct in the streets," interior ministry spokesman Abdul Karim Khalaf told AFP.

"It tried to avoid the convoy of four white SUVs of the foreigners but it came close to the last vehicle, which then opened fire immediately," a witness told AFP.

In Kirkuk, the intelligence chief at the ministry of interior was critically injured in a bomb blast Tuesday, police said. A bomb went off outside the home of Gen Abdel Amir Mahmud, in a Kirkuk suburb, 160 miles north of Baghdad, injuring him and two of his bodyguards along with a passerby.