BAGHDAD, Jan 4: A woman hiding among Iranian pilgrims with a bomb strapped under her black robe killed more than three dozen people and wounded at least 72 others on Sunday outside a Baghdad mosque.

The suicide attack was the most recent in a series that has killed more than 60 people in less than a week and marred celebrations of the transfer of many security responsibilities from the US military to Iraqi forces.

The attack in Baghdad’s northern neighbourhood of Kazimiyah came as the Iraqi military held parades to mark the anniversary of its founding 88 years ago and to celebrate the new security agreement with the United States that went into effect on Thursday.

As parade took place around noon, hundreds of worshippers had gathered a few kilometres away in Kazimiyah, home to the shrine of Imam Mousa al-Kazim. The woman was among a group of Iranian pilgrims and she blew herself up just outside the gates of the mosque, witnesses said.

The office of Iraqi army spokesman Brig-Gen Qassim al-Moussawi confirmed that a woman wearing an explosives vest was responsible for the attack.

Iraqi army and police put the deaths at 38, although the Prime Minister’s National Operations Centre said it was 36.

A report from the health ministry said the dead included 17 Iranian pilgrims, seven women among them. There were also seven Iraqi women killed by the blast.

“I saw many dead pilgrims on the ground after the explosion, all covered in blood, some of them Iranians,” one unidentified witness said.

Thousands of pilgrims from Iran visit shrines during Ashura, falling on Wednesday this year. The Iraqi police and army have deployed thousands of forces to safeguard worshippers, mostly those heading to Karbala, south of Baghdad.

Maj-Gen Othman Ali Farhood al-Ghanimy, the Iraqi army commander in Karbala, said last week that thousands of foreign pilgrims had arrived.

Among the bloodiest attacks during Ashura were a series of mortar attacks and bombings in Baghdad and Karbala in the year 2004 which killed nearly 200 pilgrims and wounded more than 500 others.

The agreement for transfer of security responbilities to Iraqi forces replaced an expired UN mandate that allowed the US and other foreign troops to operate in Iraq.

Under the new agreement, US troops in Iraq will no longer conduct unilateral operations, will act only in agreement with Iraqi forces and they cannot arrest people without warrants. They must also vacate major Iraqi cities by June and all troops must leave by the end of 2011.

It is to be seen if Iraqi security forces will be able to manage. But Iraqi President Jalal Talabani told Iraqi army troops during the parade marking the Army Day on Sunday that “the Iraqi army has gained the trust of government and Iraqi people as the army of all Iraqis.”—AP