DUBAI (AFP)— Al-Qaeda has claimed it was behind bomb attacks on judges in Iraq, saying they were carried out to avenge death sentences being handed down to Sunnis in Shiite prisons, a U.S. monitoring group said Tuesday.

The August 17 attacks were claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), Al-Qaeda's Iraqi front, in a statement posted on Islamist forums on Monday, the SITE monitoring group said.
It said the statement had warned that “fighters will not remain idle as Sunni Muslims are sentenced to death and killed in Shiite prisons.”
The group claimed that so far it has targeted 12 judges, SITE said.
Iraqi officials had reported two separate bomb attacks on August 17 -- one in Baghdad and one on the road linking the central cities of Baquba and Baladruz -- in which a total of four judges were wounded.
The officials had said the judge wounded in Baghdad was Chief Judge Kamal Jabir Bandar, head of the Iraqi Appeals Court.