* Eleven police recruits killed in attack in northern Iraq

* Iraqi and U.S. forces arrest 100 key suspects

* Head of al Qaeda's military organisation in Mosul held (Updates with attack on police recruits)

By Tim Cocks

BAGHDAD, May 19 (Reuters) - Gunmen killed 11 police recruits on Monday in an attack on a minibus in an area of northern Iraq where the army has launched an offensive against al Qaeda, a local official said.

The 11 were leaving the small town of Ba'aj in a minibus after signing up to join the police when the gunmen opened fire, Ba'aj Mayor Abdul Rahim al-Shameri told Reuters.

Ba'aj lies 130 km (80 miles) west of the city of Mosul in Nineveh province, the focus of an Iraqi army push against al Qaeda.

Sunni insurgents have carried out frequent attacks on police recruits, killing hundreds.

The commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq said Iraqi and U.S. forces had arrested about 100 suspects thought to be crucial to the operations of militant groups in their offensive in the region.

Gunmen from Sunni Islamist al Qaeda regrouped in Nineveh after being pushed out of other parts of Iraq. The U.S. military says Mosul is its last major urban stronghold, from where its fighters still stage suicide bomb attacks and assassinations.

"They have arrested upward of about 1,250 individuals, of which about 100 are critical targets," Major-General Mark Hertling told Reuters in a telephone interview from Mosul.

"In the last several weeks, we have either captured or killed several AQI (al Qaeda in Iraq) emirs (commanders), some suicide cell leaders, some military cell leaders," he said, adding some were from other groups with loose links to al Qaeda.

"Some of them are very senior. I'm talking about military emirs, battalion level commanders in al Qaeda," he said.

Two senior police officers were killed and several others wounded in a rash of attacks around Iraq in the last 24 hours.

A local Iraqi police chief in the southern town of Suq al-Shiyukh died on Monday when a bomb placed under his bed exploded while he slept, police said.

Lieutenant-Colonel Ahmed al-Nori, head of police intelligence in the Rusafa area of northern Baghdad, was killed by gunmen who attacked his car on Sunday in Baghdad's Sadr City area, police said. His driver was wounded in the attack in the slum district, a stronghold of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The head of a police station in the Qouds area of Baghdad, a police captain based in the Ministry of Interior, and three other police officers were wounded in three separate attacks on Monday in or near the capital.

Mohammed al-Askari, spokesman for Iraq's Defence Ministry, said Iraqi forces had captured one of the Mosul leaders of al Qaeda on Sunday.

Abdul Khaleq al-Sabawi, head of al Qaeda's military organisation in Mosul, was arrested near Tikrit, half-way between Mosul and Baghdad, in Salahuddin province and taken back to Mosul, he said.

Eight other suspected al Qaeda members were arrested in the same raid on a house near Tikrit, according to Ahmed al-Fahal, head of the police anti-terrorism unit in Salahuddin province.

U.S. officials blame al Qaeda for most big bombings in Iraq, including an attack on a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 that set off a wave of sectarian killings that nearly tipped Iraq into all-out civil war.

An influx of U.S. troops last year and a decision by Sunni Arab tribes to turn against al Qaeda enabled U.S. and Iraqi forces to push the militants out of Baghdad and the western province of Anbar, their former strongholds.

Iraq's Sunni Arab vice president, Tareq al-Hashemi, called on the U.S. military on Monday to make an example of an American soldier who used a copy of the Koran for target practice, demanding he receive the "most severe punishment".

The soldier was disciplined and removed from Iraq after a copy of the Muslim holy book was found pocked with bullet holes at a shooting range, the U.S. military said on Sunday. (Additional reporting by Michael Georgy, Wisam Mohammed, Aseel Kami and Adrian Croft in Baghdad)

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