A suicide bomber attacked a Shia mosque in northern Baghdad on Friday, killing at least seven people and wounding another 18, police said.
The bomber, wearing an explosives belt, struck just before Friday prayers at the Buratha mosque, where at least 85 people were killed on April 7 in an attack by three suicide bombers.
The new blast comes despite a massive security crackdown launched on Thursday in the Iraqi capital, which saw around 70 000 troops and police patrol the streets and set up checkpoints, with a curfew in the city also extended.
The bomber was on foot as the streets of Baghdad were largely free of cars due to a four-hour ban on vehicles during Friday prayers, introduced as part of the new security measures.
It is the latest in a series of attacks on Shia mosques, many of them blamed on efforts by al-Qaeda in Iraq to ignite antagonism between Shia and Sunnis.
The most inflammatory attack was on April 7 when a huge bomb almost destroyed the golden-domed mosque in the city of Samarra, one of Shia Islam’s most revered sites.
That blast sparked a wave of tit-for-tat sectarian killings that at one stage looked set to plunge Iraq into full-blown civil war.
Friday’s explosion is the first attack on a Shia mosque since Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed just over a week ago when US planes bombed his safe house near Baghdad.
Iraqi and US officials claimed on Thursday they were close to dealing a decisive blow to al-Zarqawi’s organisation after numerous raids following the insurgent leader’s death yielded a wealth of information about the group’s movements, bases and tactics, as well as more than 700 captives.
Mowafaq al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser, said a computer memory stick, laptop and other documents had been found in the rubble of the house near Baquba after the US air strike on Zarqawi.
One document suggested that the group’s best tactic to ease the pressure would be to foment war between the US and Iran.
”We believe this is the beginning of the end of al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Rubaie told a news conference in Baghdad. ”We feel we know their locations, the names of their leaders, their whereabouts, their movements, through the documents we found during the last few days.” – Guardian Unlimited Â