Nine people were killed when militants attacked a police station in north Iraq on Wednesday with mortar rounds and automatic weapons

Nine people were killed when militants attacked a police station in north Iraq on Wednesday with mortar rounds and automatic weapons, doctors and officials said.
  
It came after an Al-Qaeda front group claimed brazen assaults on two prisons in Iraq that killed more than 40 people, among them 20 security forces members, and saw hundreds of inmates, including senior militants, escape.
  
Security forces are desperately hunting the prisoners who escaped in Sunday night's jailbreaks to prevent them rejoining the ranks of the militants and carrying out further attacks.
  
Wednesday's assault on a police station about 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of the northern city of Mosul, also left two policemen wounded, the sources said. It was followed by a roadside bomb explosion as emergency personnel travelled to the scene, wounding another two people.
  
In a separate incident, gunmen killed a man in Baquba, a city north of Baghdad.