Thirty people were killed and 36 wounded on Wednesday when a suicide bomber attacked a Shi’ite Muslim funeral procession north-east of the Iraqi capital, police said.
More than 100 mourners were standing in a cemetery for the burial of a nephew of the director of the Muqdadiyah hospital when the explosion went off, leaving tombstones stained with blood and small body parts on the ground, the Diyala police said.
Thirty people were killed and 36 injured, said Dr Firas al-Nida of the hospital in Muqdadiya, a town about 90km north of Baghdad where the explosion went off.
Police Lieutenant Salam Hussine described the bombing as a ”terrorist act” aiming at igniting a Shi’ite-Sunni civil war.
”The people behind such attacks want to destabilise the country and shed more blood,” he said.
The director of the hospital had survived an assassination attempt on Tuesday, when his nephew was fatally wounded. The director was also the head of the local Dawa party, a junior partner in the country’s largest Shi’ite political coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, Diyala police said. Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari is the head of the Dawa party.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the extremist Sunni leader of the terrorist organisation al-Qaeda in Iraq, has made Shi’ites his chief target in an effort to ignite a civil war.
Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded near an outdoor market in southern Baghdad on Wednesday, killing at least seven and wounding 15, police said.
The bomb targeted a police patrol near the market at the time, said police Captain Firras Giti. The bomb damaged several shops and nearby vehicles. — Sapa-AP, AFP