Insurgents detonated a car bomb and fired mortar rounds into a busy commercial district in the centre of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 31 civilians, a defence official said.
At least 115 were wounded, he added.
A thick column of smoke could be seen rising over Karrada, and television pictures showed a major fire and rescuers struggling to pull the dead and injured from the rubble of collapsed buildings.
Karrada is regarded as one of the few remaining relatively safe areas of the city. Its bustling shops still attract customers from both the city’s rival religious groups.
An interior ministry official said the attack had targeted an area near a petrol station and that at least three mortar rounds had been fired after the explosion of a powerful car bomb.
A witness at the scene said that two buildings had partly collapsed from the force of the explosions, and that there appeared to have been more than one car bomb.
The mortars were fired across the Tigris River from the mainly Sunni al-Dura district into mainly Shi’ite Karrada, a security source said.
Staff at the Ibn el-Nafess hospital told Agence France-Presse they had received 23 corpses — including women and children — and treated 65 people following the blasts in the Karrada district, a busy commercial area.
Baghdad is in the grip of a bitter sectarian conflict between rival Sunni and Shi’ite death squads, while insurgents often attack government security forces and United States-led coalition troops. — AFP