Police and police recruits have been frequent targets of insurgent attacks. In one of the worst attacks, a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives near a line of national guard and police recruits waiting to take physical exams in February 2005. The blast in Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, killed 125.
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Another bombing killed 60 civilians lining up to apply for police jobs in the Kurdish city of Erbil in northern Iraq in 2005.
Police have also been blamed for violence. Gunmen in Iraqi Army and police uniforms have been responsible for recent bank robberies in Baghdad, and the kidnapping of more than 40 workers and volunteers at the Iraqi Red Crescent.
Bolani vowed to rid his ministry of rogue officers.
"We formed committees to clean and purge . . . to dismiss the bad elements from the ministry and build our institutions," Bolani said.
The Iraqi Ministry of Health estimated in November that 150,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war, which began in 2003. Other estimates put the figure as low as 51,000 or as high as 600,000. Iraq's Health Ministry is responsible for keeping estimates of civilian deaths, while the Interior Ministry keeps track of the number of police killed.
In other violence, five Iraqi officers died battling Shi'ite militiamen in a provincial capital in southern Iraq just months after British troops ceded control of the province to Iraqi security forces. Three days of fighting in Samawah, capital of the Muthana Province, posed a challenge for Iraqi forces whose responsibilities are increasing as part of a US plan to put more Iraqi provinces under local control.
Fighters linked to the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr fired rocket-propelled grenades at police headquarters and state buildings in Samawah, before government reinforcements arrived and a curfew fell on the city, police said. Masked gunmen lined rooftops.
