BAGHDAD, Sept 29: At least 85 people were killed and more than 110 wounded on Thursday when three car bombs exploded within minutes of each other in the mainly Shiite central Iraqi town of Balad, police said.

Thirty-five women and 22 children were among at least 85 people killed, said Lieutenant Colonel Adel Abdallah of the Balad police, while more than 110 others were wounded.

At least 50 of those hurt were taken to a nearby US military base, an interior ministry official said. The town’s police chief, Colonel Kadim Abdul Razzaq, was among those hurt.

Two cars blew up in the town’s main shopping street at 6:30pm and 6:40pm, with a third vehicle exploding in a market in another neighbourhood 10 minutes later, police said.

“The first car went off near the Balad bank, the second near a police station in the same street,” Abdallah said. “The third, a small tanker truck, exploded in a very busy market area.”

A curfew was clamped on the city after the attacks.

A fourth car bomb exploded an hour later in northern Baghdad, targeting an army patrol, although no casualties were immediately reported, security officials said.

A doctor at Baghdad’s Khadimiyah hospital said 40 ambulances had been dispatched to Balad, but none had yet returned.

Earlier this month, Al Qaeda’s frontman in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi declared “all-out war” on the majority Shia population.

At least nine people were killed in other violence on Thursday in the country, including four policemen in two separate attacks in Baghdad, and the mayor of Al-Khalis, a town 80 kilometres north of the capital.

The US military said that five of its soldiers had been killed in a bombing in the restive western town of Ramadi on Wednesday, without providing further details.

In another incident, the Anglican Church said the entire lay leadership of its Baghdad church, including three members of one family, were feared dead after disappearing on the road back from Jordan.—AFP