The death toll from an attack by a suicide bomber driving a fuel truck packed with explosives in western Baghdad on Wednesday rose to 50 people, police said.
Another 60 were wounded in the attack in the Mansour district. Police said the bomber lured motorists queueing for petrol to his truck, after earlier saying he had rammed into the line of vehicles.
Meanwhile, twenty people were killed and 40 wounded when a suicide bomber blew up his vehicle near a popular ice-cream parlour in a bustling commercial area full of electronics stores in Baghdad’s central Karrada district.
Police said the blast set a number of cars ablaze and damaged several shops.
In southern Baghdad, a parked car bomb exploded, killing three people and wounding five in Doura district, police said.
The spate of bombings followed a relative lull in violence in the capital that some have attributed to the increased presence of United States and Iraqi troops on the streets as they seek to curb sectarian violence between Shi’ite and Sunni Arabs.
US and Iraqi forces have stepped up security operations in Baghdad since mid-February in an attempt to stem bombings, many of them blamed on al-Qaeda, the Sunni Islamist group that US officials say is trying to spark a full-scale civil war in Iraq.
Operations have also been expanded in other parts of the country after Washington sent an extra 30 000 troops in an attempt to buy time for the Iraqi government to meet a series of political benchmarks aimed at promoting national reconciliation. — Reuters