At least 35 people were killed and 25 wounded in a double suicide car bomb attack on Monday evening in the northern Iraqi town of Tall Afar, bringing the overall car bomb death toll for the day to 53, local and security officials said.
In the bloodiest attack, two suicide bombers drove cars packed with explosives into a crowd in Tall Afar, about 400km north of Baghdad, Abdel Ghani ali Yahia, an official for the Kurdistan Democratic Party said on Tuesday.
Earlier the United States military said in a statement the two suicide bombers had driven their cars at the house of a tribal leader, killing at least 15.
This brought the overall toll for car bomb victims on Monday to at least 53 dead and 140 injured.
In Baghdad, at least eight people died and more than 100 were hurt when a mini-van was detonated by remote control at lunchtime outside a popular restaurant in a Shi’ite district, Iraqi security forces said.
Five more were killed and 19 wounded, many of them children, when a a car bomb struck a Shi’ite prayer room in Mahmudiyah, a lawless ethnically-mixed town in an area just south of Baghdad dubbed the Triangle of Death.
An interior ministry official said five bodies were retrieved from the rubble of one of several houses brought down by the blast.
The attack came against a backdrop of unprecedented tension between the newly-empowered Shi’ite majority and the ousted Sunni Arab minority.
In the northern Iraqi town of Tuz Khurmatu, 70km south of Kirkuk, five more died and 19 were hurt when a driver in a pick-up truck blew himself up outside the town hall, police captain Imad Abdallah said.
In Samarra, in the centre of the country, three suicide bombers — two of them in cars and one on foot — attacked a US military compound in the city. Four US soldiers were slightly injured in the strikes. – Sapa-AFP