A suicide car bomber killed at least 40 people and wounded 128 at a crowded bus station near a major Shi’ite shrine in the Iraqi holy city of Kerbala on Saturday, police and hospital sources said.
In Baghdad, police said a suicide car bomber detonated his device near a checkpoint at the southern Jadriyah bridge, killing 10 people, wounding 15 and burning several cars in the second major attack on a bridge in the capital in the past three days.
In the volatile southern city of Basra, British forces on Friday killed eight gunmen laying landmines in an area where four British soldiers and their translator were killed by a roadside bomb that destroyed their armoured vehicle earlier this month, the British military said on Saturday.
Television footage of the aftermath of the Kerbala explosion showed a distraught man carrying the charred body of a small child, while witnesses said the blast sent body parts flying into the air.
”I suddenly heard a horrifying explosion. I had never expected that Kerbala would see an explosion of that size because it is a safe city,” said Ali Mussawi (30) a store owner who was 50m from the blast site.
Shortly afterwards, Iraqi police fired into the air to disperse protesting crowds who blamed local authorities for failing to provide security. US helicopters buzzed over Kerbala, one of the holiest cities in Iraq.
A police source put the death toll in Kerbala, 110km south-west of Baghdad, at 65. But Khaled al-Rubaie, media director of al-Husseini hospital in Kerbala, said 41 people had been killed and 128 wounded, many of them women and children.
Holy shrine
Salim Katham, media director of Kerbala’s health directorate, said 32 people were killed and 58 wounded.
The attack occurred near a crowded market 200m from the Imam Hussein shrine, where the grandson of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad is buried — one of the most important sites for Shi’ites.
Television footage of Saturday’s bombing at the bridge in Baghdad showed the twisted, blackened wreck of what was thought to have been the car used to deliver the bomb as ambulance and rescue services worked to save the wounded.
Charred corpses were piled in the back of an ambulance, while a pair of sneakers lay next to the badly burned body of another victim on the bridge, which suffered little damage.
On Thursday, a truck bomb killed seven people on the Sarafiya bridge in northern Baghdad, destroying most of the steel structure in an attack parliament speaker Mahmoud Mashhadani called a conspiracy to split the city. A dozen bridges cross the Tigris in Baghdad, linking the east and the west of the city.
Saturday’s violence came a day after leaders from across Iraq’s sectarian divide pleaded for unity as they gathered under high security at a special session of parliament to condemn a suicide bombing that tore through the building on Thursday.
An al-Qaeda-backed group, the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq, claimed responsibility in a Web statement for the attack — the worst so far on Baghdad’s most secure area — which killed a member of Parliament and wounded two dozen other people in the building’s restaurant.
A two-month old, US-backed crackdown in Baghdad seen as a last-ditch attempt to halt Iraq’s slide into civil war between majority Shi’ites and once dominant Sunnis has succeeded in reducing the number of targeted killings, but US and Iraqi commanders find car and suicide bombers much harder to stop. – Reuters