IRAQ: A suicide car-bomber blasted two coaches carrying Iranian pilgrims outside a Shia Muslim shrine in Iraq at dawn yesterday, killing 12 people and wounding 41, police and health officials said.
The attack came a day after the US military warned that al-Qaeda's new leader in Iraq could order new car bombings after the killing of his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a month ago.
The bomber drove his car between the two Iranian coaches as they arrived at the Maithem al-Tamar shrine in Kufa, a religious centre on the outskirts of the main Shia holy city of Najaf, 160km south of Baghdad, police said.
The burnt-out wreckage of the two coaches littered the street, where three women in distinctive Iranian dress lay dead. Smoke rose from the charred remains of the bomber's car.
Police said that several Iraqi children, who make a living wheeling invalid pilgrims in carts at the shrine, were also caught in the blast. Many sleep there, waiting for business.
The head of Najaf's health service, Munther al-Athari, said that eight of the dead were Iranian, three of them women. Men, women and children were among the 41 wounded, 22 of whom were Iranian. Earlier, doctors put the death toll at 13.
Shia worshippers have been targeted previously in sectarian attacks by Sunni Arab insurgents and the US military warned on Wednesday of a possible increase in car-bomb attacks after the nomination of Abu Ayyub al-Masri to head al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Masri, named by Osama bin Laden last week, has a reputation as an organiser of car-bombings. One such blast killed more than 60 people at a market in a Shia area of Baghdad last Saturday, the deadliest attack in the city for three months. Another car-bombing killed six people in the capital on Wednesday.
A leading Sunni Arab political group said that the attack in Kufa was intended to provoke further sectarian bloodshed. The US embassy condemned the attack and urged Iraqis to exercise restraint and "renew efforts to halt the spread of sectarian conflict".
Since the fall in 2003 of Saddam Hussein, whose Sunni Muslim-dominated government fought Shia Iran in the 1980s, large numbers of Iranians have travelled to holy sites around Najaf, the main centre of the Shia branch of Islam.
Tehran urged better security for pilgrims and blamed the US for the violence gripping Iraq.
Saddam, who is due back in court next Monday to hear his defence sum up his denial of crimes against humanity, has begun a hunger strike in prison, according to his lead lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi. His US military jailers could not confirm this.
Saddam and others have demanded an investigation into the killing last month of a lawyer who was the third member of their defence team to be killed since the trial began in October.
Kufa is a base for many supporters of the radical Shia cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr. His Mehdi army fighters, along with other Shia armed groups, are accused by Sunnis of sectarian violence.
The seven-week-old, US-backed national unity coalition government of Shia prime minister Nuri al-Maliki is trying to avert the violence and launched a national reconciliation drive last week to try to win over insurgents to the political process.
Although still heavily dependent on US military support, the government's ties to Washington have been put under pressure this week by public outcry over a rape and murder case in which US soldiers are accused of killing a family near Baghdad.
Maliki called again for an independent inquiry and review of foreign troops' immunity from Iraqi law, which he has said has "emboldened" soldiers.