Iraq town digs for bodies

Baghdad: Using heavy machinery and small shovels, Iraqi police and residents searched for bodies buried in rubble after a huge truck bomb levelled a market in northern Iraq.

Police officers in the Shiite town of Tuz Khurmato confirmed 150 people had been killed in Saturday's explosion that Iraqi officials blamed on Al Qaida. The officers said 20 people were still missing and 250 wounded.

As the clean-up work progressed, fresh bomb attacks in and around Baghdad on Sunday killed at least 29 people, including 23 Iraqi army recruits when their truck was attacked on a road near the capital.

Many of Saturday's Tuz Khurmato victims were women and children who were shopping at the time. The town mayor, Mohammed Rasheed, said the bomb destroyed around 50 small shops and 50 houses.

"I just visited the scene. It looks like an earthquake happened there," said Shalal Abid Al Ahmed, a member of the Salahuddin provincial council.

As ambulances, private cars and farmers' trucks ferried dozens of corpses and wounded civilians to clinics in Tuz Khormato and the provincial capital Kirkuk, stunned officials were yet to come to terms with the scale of attack.

The explosion - hours after a smaller suicide bombing in another Shiite village in Diyala killed more than 20 people - suggested Sunni militants are regrouping to launch attacks in regions further away from Baghdad where security is thinner.

BBC correspondents suggested the market bombing could have been linked to political developments in the region, where a referendum on the status of Kirkuk province is due to take place by the end of this year.

Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki was quoted as saying by Reuters that the "heinous crime" confirmed terrorists are the enemies of all Iraqis and showed that the attackers were "desperate to break the noose closing in upon them".