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More corpses at Baghdad morgue
24/03/2008 21:34 - (SA)
Baghdad - Baghdad's main morgue has seen a spike in the number of corpses received in the past fortnight amid a new wave of violence in and around the Iraqi capital, a medical official told AFP on Monday.
The mortuary has received an average of 15 bodies per day of people killed in violent attacks in Baghdad in the past two weeks, said the morgue's general director Munjid Rezali.
This is up from an average of two bodies a day since the beginning of the year, as overall violence dropped following the enforcement of a security plan across the city.
"There is an increase in the number of corpses of people who have died violent deaths in the past 15 days," Rezali told AFP.
"We hope the trend that we are seeing now does not continue," he added.
Insurgents have stepped up attacks in the past few weeks across Baghdad and other parts of the country.
On Sunday, at least 18 people were killed in a series of attacks in the capital, including seven when armed men opened fire on a crowd in a local market.
On March 13, a suicide bomber killed 18 people in central Baghdad's Bab al-Sharji area.
The capital has also been the scene of spectacular attacks in the last two months.
On March 6, a twin bomb attack in central Baghdad's Karada neighbourhood killed at least 68 people.
The attack followed a brutal assault on February 1 when two female suicide bombers detonated their explosive vests in a market and killed nearly 100 people.
The US and Iraqi authorities claim that attacks across Iraq have fallen by 60% since June 2007 after Washington deployed extra troops in Iraq to curb the daily bloodshed.
But they caution that al-Qaeda, which they blame for most of the violence, remains a dangerous force in Iraq and is far from defeated.
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