At least 58 people were killed and 44 wounded on Friday when a suicide attacker exploded a car bomb near a vegetable market in a mostly Shia Muslim town south of Baghdad, hospital officials said.
The slaughter in Suwayra was part of a fresh wave of insurgent violence in Iraq that has killed more than 250 people — many of them Iraqi soldiers and police — since the Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, announced his new government on April 28. Iraqi officials say the attacks are designed to fuel sectarian tensions and trigger civil war.
In Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit on Friday, a suicide bomber blew up his car beside a minibus carrying policemen, killing at least nine and wounding several others.
Elsewhere, at least a dozen bodies were found buried at a rubbish dump on the outskirts of Baghdad on Friday, some of them blindfolded and shot in the head, said Iraqi officials.
There were conflicting accounts of how many bodies had been found. Bassim al-Maslokhi, a soldier guarding the area during the recovery, counted 14; Kadhim al-Itabi, a police official, put the number at 12. The victims, believed to be Iraqis, were found in shallow graves and seemed to have been killed recently.
Elsewhere, two rebels fired at American soldiers on patrol in south Baghdad early on Friday. One militant was killed by return fire and another detained, said United States officials.
At least 26 people were killed in four attacks on Thursday. In the deadliest strike, an insurgent with explosives strapped to his body joined a queue outside an army recruitment centre in central Baghdad and blew himself up. At least 13 people were killed and 20 wounded.
It was the second such attack in as many days. On Wednesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a queue of police recruits in the northern Kurdish city of Irbil, killing 60 people and wounding 150.
Insurgents often target Iraqi security personnel, who are being recruited and trained by the US-led coalition in Iraq.
Meanwhile, militants holding hostage an Australian engineer, Douglas Wood, issued a 72-hour ultimatum on Friday for Australia to start pulling troops out of Iraq, al-Jazeera reported.
The television station, which showed pictures of Wood with his head shaved, did not say what the captors threatened to do if their deadline was not met, but several previous hostages have been killed. – Guardian Unlimited Â