Nearly 70 people were killed and more than 100 wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up on Thursday outside a police recruitment centre in the western Iraqi town of Ramadi, hospital doctors said.
Ramadi general hospital has received 50 bodies and 65 wounded, Dr Omar Rawi said by telephone.
Taamin hospital said it has received 17 bodies and 40 wounded.
Earlier on Thursday, a huge explosion rocked the centre of the city of Karbala, 100km south of Baghdad, killing at least 42 civilians and injuring dozens of others, an Iraqi police source said.
The death toll was expected to climb following the massive blast that ravaged a number of shops and hotels in the area.
It was not yet clear whether the blast was caused by a remote-controlled car bomb or by suicide bombers, the source added.
Karbala’s governor, Aqeel al-Khazraji, said 44 were killed and 48 injured.
Pools of blood could be seen at the blast site, and television images showed men ferrying the wounded in push carts. The explosion appeared to have been set off about 30m from one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest shrines in a busy pedestrian area surrounded by shops.
Haydar al-Baghdadi, deputy to Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, described the explosion as a ”cowardly act behind which lies members of the defunct Ba’ath party and extremist groups”.
Meanwhile, a roadside bomb killed five United States soldiers on Thursday after exploding near an American convoy, the military said.
The US statement said only that the soldiers were patrolling in the Baghdad area. Iraqi police Captain Rahim Slaho said earlier that a US convoy headed for the Shi’ite holy city of Karbala had been attacked 35km south of the city and that five soldiers were killed.
On Wednesday, a suicide bomber caused carnage at a Shi’ite funeral and gunmen ambushed a vital fuel convoy outside Baghdad in a series of attacks that killed more than 50 people.
The funeral attack, which killed 36 and wounded 40, was one of the bloodiest single incidents since the parliamentary elections on December 15. More than 100 mourners were standing in a cemetery in Muqdadiyah, about 95km north of Baghdad, when a suicide bomber hiding among them detonated his explosives. — AFP, Sapa-AP, Guardian Unlimited Â