BBC News with David Austin.

Bomb attacks in Baghdad have killed at least 14 people as some early voting took place in Iraq's parliamentary elections. Suicide bombers killed seven soldiers at two polling stations while seven civilians died in an attack at another. More than half a million members of the Iraqi armed forces were voting early to free them for security duties on the main polling day on Sunday. Gabriel Gatehouse sent this report from a polling station in Baghdad.

The police and the military have thrown everything they got to try to stop attackers from disrupting the poll. All leaves have been canceled and there will be around 200,000 personnel on duty in Baghdad alone.

"We are ready for anything." this policemen told us, "If we don't risk our lives, how will we change the country." The Americans too, are hoping that these elections will bring about change. There are still around 100,000 US troops in Iraq. The Pentagon wants that number halved by the summer in preparation for a full military withdrawal by 2012.

The Nigerian Senates has begun an inquiry after graphic pictures appeared on the Internet showing bodies strewn across the road after an armed robbery on the Lagos to Beining in highway. There is no indication of when the robbery took place. Caroline Duffield reports from Lagos.

These pictures appeared to show the bodies of men and women twisted and crushed in the road in broad daylight. Bloggers and local journalists circulating them and describing an attack on a bus on the Lagos-Beining express way. There are claims that the passengers were made to lie down in the road and that the bus driver was forced to run them over and that is how the large number of death occurred. Senators have now set up a committee of inquiry to try to find out what happened.