BAGHDAD: Suicide bombers attacked Shia pilgrims in Baghdad and a primary school and police station in a Shiite village in north Iraq yesterday, killing at least 24 people, officials said.
The violence is at a level unseen since 2008, amid persistent fears of a relapse into the kind of intense Sunni-Shia bloodshed that peaked in 2006-2007 and killed tens of thousands of people.
A suicide bomber detonated explosives near pilgrims walking to a shrine in north Baghdad to commemorate the death of Imam Mohammed Al Jawad, the ninth Shia imam. The blast killed at least nine people and wounded 30 others, officials said.
Two more suicide bombers yesterday targeted the Turkmen Shia village of Qabak in Nineveh province about 50km from the border with Syria.
The bombers detonated explosives-rigged vehicles at a police station and a primary school, killing 15 people and wounding 44, local official Abdulal Abbas said.
“Al-Qaeda terrorists... carried out the crime because we are Shias,” a weeping mother whose young son was wounded in Qabak said at a hospital in Dohuk province.
A bomb also exploded in east Baghdad, killing at least five people and wounding 14, while two blasts in the northern province of Kirkuk killed a Kurdish security forces member and wounded another.AFP
