Scores killed in car bomb attacks

Karbala: A suicide car bomber killed at least 40 people and wounded scores at a crowded bus station near a Shiite shrine in the Iraqi city of Karbala yesterday, police and hospital sources said.

In Baghdad, police said a suicide car bomber detonated his device near a checkpoint at the southern Jadriyah bridge, killing 10 people and burning several cars in the second major attack on a bridge in the capital in the past three days.

Television footage of the aftermath of the Karbala explosion showed a distraught man cradling the charred body of a small child, while witnesses said the blast sent body parts flying into the air. Wailing ambulances rushed to the scene.

As US helicopters buzzed over Karbala, 110km southwest of Baghdad, authorities imposed an indefinite curfew. The attack occurred near a crowded market 200 metres from the Imam Hussain shrine.

Attacks at or near shrines are highly provocative. The bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 unleashed the sectarian violence that has pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.

Bridge hit

Khalid Al Rubaie, media director of Karbala's Al Hussaini hospital, said 41 people had been killed and 138 wounded, many of them women and children.

Earlier, a police source put the death toll at 65 while Salim Katham, media director of Karbala's health directorate, had said 32 people were killed and 58 wounded.

Insurgents also used a suicide bomber yesterday to strike Baghdad's Jadriyah bridge, although it escaped without suffering any structural damage. People nearby were not so lucky. Charred corpses were piled in the back of an ambulance, while a pair of sneakers lay next to the badly burned body of another victim on the bridge.

Two days earlier, a truck bomb killed seven people on the Sarafiyah bridge.