BAGHDAD (AFP) - A baby boy and four policemen were killed in a series of attacks in and around Baghdad on Saturday, Iraqi security officials said.

A rocket attack in the sprawling Shiite district of Sadr City killed the 16-month-old baby boy and wounded two of his brothers and a cousin, Iraqi security officials said.

"His two brothers aged four and six, were wounded along with a female cousin," an interior ministry official said. A medic at Baghdad morgue confirmed the death.

Two policemen were killed and seven others were wounded by a roadside bomb that targeted their patrol in the west of the city, a local police official told AFP.

Another two policemen were among the wounded in the blast on the main road between Baghdad and Fallujah near Abu Ghraib city, a bastion of an anti-US Sunni Arab insurrection before fighters there turned their backs on their Al-Qaeda allies.

In central Baghdad a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol in Al-Ghadeer district killed two officers and wounded five other people, police said.

The rocket that hit the dead baby's home may have been targeting a US military position a kilometre (less than a mile) away, the official said.

Sadr City was once one of Baghdad's most violent areas until a joint US and Iraqi military campaign last year brought relative peace to the city's largest slum.