Baghdad, Iraq ? Insurgents in Baghdad struck a police station and a mosque at dawn Friday, killing at least 30 people and wounding nearly as many. The brazen attacks appeared to be part of a surge in violence aimed at disrupting elections set for Jan. 30.

Fighting also flared in northern Iraq. U.S. and Iraqi troops battled with insurgents in Mosul, the country’s third-largest city, in fighting that left “around 20” outlaw gunmen dead, military spokesman Lt. Col. Paul Hastings said. Four American soldiers were wounded, he said.

Near the northern city of Kirkuk, insurgents attacked a U.S. patrol with an improvised bomb, killing one soldier and wounding two others, a military statement said.

The scenes of carnage on the Muslim prayer day deepened dread about the weakness of fledgling security forces in the face of surging pre-election violence.

In the daring dawn assault, hooded and heavily armed insurgents fired mortars at a police station in Baghdad’s Amil neighborhood hugging the Tigris River, laying siege to the installation before storming inside. Once the insurgents overcame minor resistance, they executed 16 officers and wounded 10 others, authorities said.

Dozens of unkempt prisoners, many with long beards, were freed from their cells and let onto the streets as the insurgents fled in waiting vehicles, witnesses said.

In a second attack, also shortly after 6 a.m., a car bomb shattered the wail of dawn prayers at a Shiite Muslim mosque in Azamiyah, a mainly Sunni Muslim neighborhood where sectarian passions already were inflamed.

“It was quite a large explosion,” said Sabah Kadhim, an Interior Ministry spokesman. It killed at least 14 civilians and injured 19 people, he said.

He said the aim was to disrupt the election. “Baghdad is the center. And they want to show, ‘Look, Baghdad isn’t safe. And the elections shouldn’t take place,”‘ he said.

A man cries over the coffin of his brother outside Baghdad's Yarmouk hospital. The man was one of at least 16 police officers killed in an insurgent-led attack Friday on a police station in Baghdad.

German authorities arrested three Iraqis with alleged al-Qaida links on suspicion they were planning an attack on Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi while he visited Germany on Friday, the country’s chief prosecutor said.

The arrests were announced while Allawi was in Berlin and hours before he met German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Investigators who had the three suspects under surveillance noticed an increase in activity, phone calls and suspicious movements by one suspect before Allawi’s visit that amounted to “evidence of plans of an attack,” chief federal prosecutor Kay Nehm said.