Bloodbath mars Iraq holy day

2005-02-19 22:37

Baghdad - At least 40 people, including one American soldier, were killed in a series of suicide and bomb attacks in Iraq on Saturday that marred the holiest Shiite Muslim day of Ashura for the second year running.

In Baghdad, at least 27 people died, including 19 in a suicide attack on a bus carrying Shiite pilgrims, and 109 were wounded, a government source said.

In the most lethal blast, 19 people died in Baghdad's Aden square when a suicide bicycle bomber attacked a bus carrying pilgrims from a mosque in the north of the city, according to the government source.

Another 40 people were wounded in the attack.

The US army said an American soldier and an Iraqi civilian were killed in Aden square in a suicide bombing as US soldiers responded to a request for help from Iraqi security forces after an earlier explosion wounded several Iraqis.

It was not immediately clear if the earlier explosion was the one that killed 19 people.

Another suicide bomber on a bicycle rode into a Sunni funeral tent in the mainly Shiite Baya district in the south of the capital, killing four and wounding 37, medical sources said.

A mortar attack close to the Al-Nida mosque in the northern Baghdad Sunni district of Adhamiya also killed four, the government source said.

Meanwhile, five Iraqi soldiers were killed in a mortar attack on a checkpoint they were manning near the rebel bastion of Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, said hospital and security sources.

Iraqi and US forces also discovered three cars rigged with explosives around 50km south of Baghdad, which police said insurgents probably intended to explode as Shiite pilgrims returned from Karbala.

Last year the holy day of Ashura saw 170 people killed in bomb attacks in the capital and in the pilgrimage city of Karbala, to the south.

Earlier on Saturday, a suicide bomber killed two people in the town of Baquba, northeast of the capital, in an apparent attempt to assassinate an Iraqi general, security sources said.

Also north of the capital, two people were killed when a shell hit houses in Samarra, which was recaptured from insurgents last October, while two policemen were killed by an improvised bomb north of the city, police said.

In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, unknown gunmen killed a Sunni sheikh linked to the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two main Kurdish parties.

Near Balad, south of Samarra, the corpses of five executed soldiers were found overnight riddled with bullet wounds and with their hands tied.

- AFP