IRAQ: A series of suicide attacks and car bombings killed at least 27 Shia Muslims in Iraq yesterday, the eve of the majority sect's most important religious ritual, raising fears of an outbreak of sectarian violence. Up to 40 Iraqis were killed yesterday.
It was Iraq's bloodiest day since the January 30th elections, which shifted power to Shias after decades of oppression under Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime.
In the latest attack, a car bomb exploded outside a Shia mosque in the town of Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, killing seven people and wounding 10, local hospital officials said. Suicide bombings of two Shia mosques in Baghdad earlier killed at least 17 people.
Separately, a rocket landed near a police station and close to a mosque in a Shia district of north-western Baghdad, killing three people and wounding five in a shop, police said.
Hours later a suicide bomber killed two policemen and a member of the Iraq National Guard in Baghdad, police said.
In the first suicide attack, a man wearing an explosives-packed vest merged into a crowd near a mosque in south-west Baghdad and blew himself up, survivors said. The blast killed 15 people and wounded 33, according to Yarmouk hospital.
Soon afterwards, an explosion shook a second Shia mosque in western Baghdad, the US military and police sources said.
Police said two suicide bombers had approached a crowd outside the mosque. They were spotted by police, who shot them, but one still blew himself up, killing at least two people.
Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, told CNN he believed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who is al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, was behind the attacks. Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for many of Iraq's worst strikes.
The attacks came as thousands of Shias marched through the capital for Ashura - a religious festival - a day after a Shia alliance was confirmed as winner of last month's historic election, handing power for the first time to the long-oppressed community. A majority of Sunni Muslims abstained from the polls.
UN Security General Kofi Annan condemned the attacks. In Kirkuk, a blast killed a man at a Shia-Turkman mosque. Yesterday's attacks recalled Ashura last year, when 170 people were killed in suicide bombings in Baghdad and Kerbala.