BAGHDAD, Feb 12: A suicide car bomber killed 18 people near a hospital south of Baghdad on Saturday amid a surge of violence by Iraq's mostly Sunni insurgents ahead of Ashura, the holiest ceremony on the Shia religious calendar.
The bomber drove his vehicle towards local government offices and a hospital in the town of Musayyib, southwest of Baghdad, but detonated it outside blast walls protecting the buildings, police said. Most of the dead were civilians.
Around 25 people were also wounded in the attack, the second suicide car bombing in as many days.
Attacks on Shia targets on Friday seemed designed to fuel sectarian tension. A suicide bomber killed 13 people at a mosque north of the capital and gunmen killed nine at a Baghdad bakery.
Sunni militants and have exploited religious rifts before to try to fragment Iraq and destabilise the US-backed government.
Insurgents also struck in the southern city of Basra on Saturday, killing a senior judge, Taha al-Amiri, as he drove to work. It was the city's second assassination in a week.
In Kirkuk, police sources said they were hot on the trail of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who has claimed responsibility for many of the worst attacks in Iraq, including the beheading of several foreign hostages.
"He came to Kirkuk from Mosul," a source in the Kirkuk police department said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "There's a possibility that he might be captured at any moment."
In Baiji, west of Kirkuk, a roadside blast killed two Iraqi policemen and a civilian, a police source said, while a car bomb killed a woman and wounded six people in eastern Baghdad.
In Baquba, north of the capital, a police lieutenant was shot dead whilst sitting in a shop.
ASHURA FEARS: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned during a visit to Iraq on Friday that it would take some time for Iraqi security forces to crush the insurgency.
Concerned to prevent a wave of bloodshed coinciding with Ashura, the interim government has said it will seal all borders between Feb. 17 and Feb. 22 to stop pilgrims flooding into Iraq. Many pilgrims come from neighbouring Iran and from Pakistan.
Last year during Ashura, which honours the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, suicide bombers blew themselves up among crowds of Shia pilgrims in Baghdad and Kerbala, killing 171 people.
The resumption of near-daily suicide attacks is a blow to hopes among some officials that the election, which saw millions of Iraqis go to the polls in defiance of insurgent threats, might mark a turning point after two years of violence.
Attacks slowed after the vote, but suicide bombs in Baghdad, Baquba and Mosul since then have killed more than 60 police, soldiers and would-be recruits to the security forces.
A religious-based coalition blessed by Iraq's foremost Shia scholar Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has a commanding lead, with around half the 4.6 million votes so far tallied.
A coalition of Kurdish parties is in second place and a bloc led by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is third.
If the Shia coalition wins, as widely expected, it would put Iraq's 60 per cent Shia majority in power for the first time, after decades of oppression under Saddam, a Sunni.
Allawi travelled to northern Iraq on Saturday to meet Jalal Talabani in the hope of striking a deal with the powerful Kurdish bloc. It was Allawi's second meeting with a Kurdish leader in three days.-Reuters
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