BAGHDAD, July 23: Bombers killed at least 64 people on Sunday, striking a bloody blow against Iraq’s fledgling hopes for peace just one day after the government launched national reconciliation talks.
A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden minibus amid a crowd of day labourers seeking work in a crowded market in Baghdad’s mainly Shiite district of Sadr City at 9:20 am, killing at least 34 people.
This was followed by a bomb attack in front of the area’s town hall, which killed eight, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s office said in a statement.
Three hours later a one-ton car bomb exploded outside a courthouse in the mixed northern city of Kirkuk, leaving at least 22 dead and 100 injured, according to Kirkuk police chief General Borhan Habib Tayeb.
Tayeb said the car had been rigged with several bombs to produce a cascading series of explosions designed to maximise loss of life.
“There was a single car which exploded. The police believe that there were 1,000 kilos of TNT packed into several bombs,” he said.
In Sadr City, a police officer said: “A man parked a minibus in a busy street next to a police station, where day labourers were waiting for work. He wasn’t aiming for police — he wanted to kill as many people as possible.”
Maliki’s statement said that 34 people had been killed and 73 injured, with eight more killed in the follow-up bomb and 20 more injured.
The bomber has not yet been identified, but suspicion will fall on Sunni extremists who have been competing with Shiite death squads in a tit-for-tat series of sectarian massacres from Iraq’s rival Muslim communities.
These killings continued on Sunday, when five civilians were gunned down in separate attacks in the Baquba region north of Baghdad.
Further north, in Moqtadiya, four Shiites who were kidnapped on Saturday were found murdered, according to the interior minister.
In Baghdad, the first powerful explosion shook windows across the capital and smoke could be seen rising over the Jamila area of Sadr City.
Workers seeking short-term employment throng Jamila market in the mornings, and the bomb went off by the outer wall of a police station.—AFP
