KARBALA, April 28: A suicide car bomber detonated his payload on a crowded street near a revered shrine in the Iraqi city of Karbala on Saturday, killing at least 55 people and wounding nearly 160 others.
“Many of the wounded are women and children,” said Salim Kadhim, spokesman for the Karbala health department. “Many of them are in a serious condition, so the number of dead is likely to rise.” A senior police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the attack had been carried out by a suicide bomber, the deadly hallmark of Iraq's Sunni insurgency.
The blast erupted 200 metres from the shrine of Imam Abbas, the second holiest in Karbala, at 7:10 pm (1510 GMT) when Al-Abbas street was crowded with passers-by, local officials said.
A vast, angry crowd -- several hundred strong -- descended on the scene to search for missing relatives amid thick black smoke rising from a number of cars burned out following the explosion.
Ambulances struggled to nose their way through the crowd to pick up the bloodied dead and wounded, scattered in doorways and by the roadside.
“As a result of the explosion that took place at the Al-Kabla gate of the shrine of Imam Abbas a curfew has been imposed from 8:00 pm to 8:00 am on Sunday,” said Abdulal Yasiri, chief of Karbala provincial council.
The explosion was the second such attack to rock the central Iraqi shrine city in two weeks, after an April 14 suicide bombing near the main Imam Hussein shrine bomb killed 42 people and wounded scores more.
Although the shrines were not reported to have been damaged, the latest attack will stoke already raging sectarian tensions, as previous assaults on Shia mosques have usually been blamed on Sunni extremists.
Elsewhere in Iraq, at least another 19 people were killed on Saturday in the ongoing carnage.
Four people were killed and three others wounded when gunmen attacked a public minibus in Baghdad's mixed Sunni and Shia district of Zafaraniyah, a security official said.
In a separate attack in the same neighbourhood, a group of garbage collectors stumbled upon a roadside bomb which killed one and wounded eight others, the security official said.
In nearby Saydiyah, another mixed district, unidentified gunmen shot dead five civilians and wounded another, he added.
In Al-Risala, a series of mortar rounds slammed into a residential area, killing three people and wounding 10 more, including women and children, the official said.
In Khadimiyah, one civilian was killed and three others were injured when a homemade bomb blew up in a public market, a police source said.
A pre-dawn mortar attack killed a five-year-old girl in the Janaja region, the hometown of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, outside Karbala.
In the northern city of Mosul, unknown gunmen ambushed and killed Abdullah Mohammed, who had been a major in Saddam Hussein's now disbanded army, in the Wahda neighbourhood, said police Major Mohammed Ahmed.
He said Mosul police had also found three unidentified corpses.
Also on Saturday, two civilians were gunned down outside Kirkuk and a police officer was shot dead in Samarra, according to local police in the two cities.
Police also found 18 corpses in Baghdad, a security official said.—AFP
