A suicide bomb tore through a packed funeral ceremony at a Shia mosque in Mosul on Thursday, killing at least 46 people and wounding up to 100 others.
The attack appeared to be the latest outrage by Sunni militants intent on fomenting sectarian strife and destabilising attempts to form an elected Iraqi government.
The bombing came as the two main winners of January’s elections — the Shia and Kurdish blocs — said they were within days of agreeing to the formation of Iraq’s first elected government for decades.
Jawad al-Maliki, an official with the Shia Dawa party and member of the negotiating committee for the United Iraq Alliance, said: ”We have agreed on a government of national unity. All sectors of society will participate, including Sunni Arabs, and we will depend on [the interim constitution] to run the country and the permanent constitution it drafted.”
He said the government would be formed when the transitional national assembly meets next Wednesday.
Witnesses and hospital officials said Thursday’s blast tore through the courtyard of a mosque in the working-class Tameem area of Mosul, Iraq’s third-biggest city.
”As we were inside the mosque, we saw a ball of fire and heard a huge explosion,” Tahir Abdullah Sultan (45) told the Associated Press. ”Blood and pieces of flesh were scattered around the place.”
Hospital authorities expected the death toll to rise
Mosul, in north-east Iraq, was a stronghold of the former Sunni-dominated Ba’athist regime, but it is also one of the country’s most ethnically and religiously diverse cities -home to Shia, Kurds, Turkomen, Christians and Yezidis.
In separate violence, a police chief, Colonel Ahmed Obeis, and two other officers were shot dead in Baghdad by insurgents posing as police.
As controversy continued over last week’s ”friendly fire” incident in which American soldiers killed an Italian secret service agent and wounded a freed hostage, a US embassy spokesperson said the checkpoint at which the shooting happened was a temporary one set up to provide extra protection for the convoy of the US ambassador, John Negroponte.
Britain criticised the reinstallation of Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Omar Karami, after he resigned following big anti-Syrian street protests.
Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said that he had ”suspicions” about whether the Lebanese elections set for May would be free and fair if Syria failed to pull out its troops and intelligence officers. – Guardian Unlimited Â