At least 27 people, including one child and four women, were killed and almost 200 wounded in explosions at a mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday as they gathered for a religious holiday, officials said.
”Until now we have received 27 corpses, most of whom suffered terrible wounds to the head and abdomen,” said Abdallah Hatem, the head of the morgue of a nearby hospital.
Doctor Ahmed Zia, in charge of the emergency services department at the Kazimyah hospital, said more than 100 people had been brought in with injuries.
Victims were also being taken to other hosipitals in the area.
At Karhk hospital, where urgent calls were being made for blood donors, a nurse said that about 70 people were being treated, some with serious injuries, while about 18 were accepted at the city medical centre.
Witnesses at the scene described how they saw people dragging bodies from the Kazimyah mosque, which houses a shrine for Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority.
”I helped pull eight bodies out of the mausoleum and I estimate the number of injured at 25,” said one witness, Luai Ali Thai.
A security officer at the scene said that three rockets had been fired at around 10.00am [7.am GMT] and that ”one of them landed inside the Kazem mausoleum, and the two others dropped short outside”.
Ambulances raced to and from the scene while fire trucks and police were out in force. Two United States helicopters hovered overhead.
Shocked women cloaked in black Shiite robes poured out of the mosque, which police had cordoned off, and witnesses said a crowd had almost lynched television cameramen at the scene, thinking they had been linked to the explosions.
Adding to the deadly confusion, one US soldier was killed and a second wounded when attackers dropped a home made bomb on their vehicle as they drove under a freeway in the eastern part of Baghdad on Tuesday morning.
”As they drove under an overpass an IED (improvised explosive device) was dropped from the overpass,” said a coalition military official.
”The vehicle was destroyed, one coalition soldier was killed and another wounded,” he said, adding that the wounded soldier’s condition was serious but not critical.
The attacks came almost simultaneously with blasts in the Shiite sacred city of Karbala which killed at least 50 people as Iraq’s Shiite majority publicly marked the holy day of Ashura for the first time after decades of repression. – Sapa-AFP