Monday 26 December 2005, 3:33 Makka Time, 0:33 GMT

Iraq has returned to its violent ways after a brief lull during a fairly peaceful poll - secured partly by an informal ceasefire by Sunni rebels hoping for representation in parliament.

Bombs struck Iraqi police and army patrols and destroyed an American Abrams tank in Baghdad on Sunday. The tank was left in flames after a dawn attack in eastern Baghdad. Witnesses said it had been destroyed by a roadside bomb.

Also on Sunday, two car bombs, parked by the roadside, went off at lunchtime, wounding three Iraqi soldiers and a civilian in the city centre and three policemen in eastern Baghdad, police said.

Two soldiers were killed and six wounded in a mortar attack on an Iraqi base at Mahmudiya, just south of the capital.

In Kirkuk, where Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen are vying for control of the northern oilfields, a civilian was killed and seven wounded when a car bomb went off near a police patrol.

Further north, in Mosul, Iraq's third city where ethnic tensions between Arabs and Kurds are also high, a roadside bomb killed a policeman when it detonated close to his patrol.

Student's killing

The killing of a Sunni Arab student leader, abducted after heading two demonstrations against the election results, prompted accusations against militias loyal to the victorious Shia Islamists and their Kurdish allies in the interim government.

Anger flared around the university campus in Mosul after the body of Qusay Salaheddin, president of the student union, was identified. He had been kidnapped on Thursday with one of his friends. The two bodies were found on Saturday, handcuffed and shot in the head.

No group claimed responsibility for the killing.

Boycott threat?

Official election results are not expected before January, but preliminary reports suggest that Shia-based religious parties will dominate parliament, heightening fears of sectarian division.

Sunni and secular parties were reported to have demanded a rerun of the 15 December election and threatened to boycott parliament.

But one of the main prominent Sunni groups, the Iraqi Concord Front denied reports that it had decided to boycott the political process.

Speaking to Aljazeera by telephone from Amman, Adnan al-Dulaimi, a Sunni politician, said groups that had rejected the outcome of recent elections in Iraq had met in Amman to demand the annulment of election results in a number of cities.

But he added: "We have not decided to suspend participation in the political process."

Talabani plea

However, Aljazeera's correspondent in Jordan also spoke to another representative, Shaikh Khalaf al-Alayaan, who had said opposition groups had agreed not to participate in any government, even a government of national unity.

Meanwhile, Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president, urged Sunnis to join a consensus government.

Speaking to reporters in Kurdish Sulmaniya, in between talks with Zalmay Khalizad, the US ambassador to Iraq, Talabani said "without Sunni parties there will be no consensus government ... without consensus government there will be no unity, there will be no peace".

Aljazeera + Agencies