Baghdad, Iraq ? Gunmen assassinated a Defense Ministry official as Iraq’s insurgency continued its campaign of targeting members of the interim government, Iraqi officials said Monday.

Issam Jassim Qassim, a director general in the ministry, was shot by three men in a white Opel car late Sunday near his home in the southwestern Baghdad neighborhood of Sayadiya, a ministry spokesman said.

Less than 12 hours later, a truck bomb exploded outside a police station in the same neighborhood, killing nine and wounding 56.

Qassim’s assassination was the latest in a string of attacks on government officials.

On Saturday, Justice Minister Malik Dohan Hassan survived a suicide car bomb attack on his convoy that killed two civilians and three bodyguards. A provincial governor was killed last week. The director of cultural relations at the Education Ministry and Deputy Foreign Minister Bassam Salih Kubba were killed in June.