Gunmen shot dead three Iraqi civilians in a northern Baghdad district and wounded a veteran female presenter who works for an Iraqi official radio on Sunday, an Interior Ministry source said.

"Gunmen in a vehicle opened fire on three civilians, killing all of them in the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiyah," the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

In a separate incident, Amal al-Mudaris, a veteran female presenter who works in a state-run radio, was critically wounded when gunmen showered her with bullets while she was leaving her house in Khadraa district in western Baghdad, the source said.

Mudaris, in her 60s, is a well-known Iraqi media worker who worked for the Iraqi radio and television since 1960s and continued her work for the Iraqi media network after the collapse of Saddam regime in 2003.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military said that 18 rounds of artillery were fired from a U.S. base in southeastern Baghdad earlier in the day without identifying the targets of the barrage.

"Eighteen rounds of artillery were fired from Forward Operating Base Falcon," a U.S. military spokesman told reporters.

Earlier, residents of the capital's southern areas said that more than a dozen of large explosions rocked their neighborhoods at about 9:00 a.m. (0500 GMT).

Brigadier General Qassim Atta, spokesman of the security crackdown told the state-run television Al-Iraqiya, that the blasts were part of the joint U.S. and Iraqi security plan without specifying what caused the blasts.

Source: Xinhua