AL ARABIYA – AGENCIES
- Car bomb
At least 31 people were killed and 50 others wounded when a bomb exploded near a Baghdad marketplace on Friday in the latest attack on a mainly Shi’ite neighborhood since a political crisis erupted in December, police and hospital sources said.
An interior ministry official confirmed the explosion in Zafraniyah, which struck at 11:00 am (08:00 GMT), but said it was caused by a suicide attacker driving an explosives-packed car.
The blast hit the funeral procession of Mohammed al-Maliki, a real estate agent who was killed along with his wife and son a day earlier in the west Baghdad neighborhood of Yarmuk, the doctor and interior ministry official said. Both spoke on condition of anonymity.
The procession had collected Maliki’s body and was transporting it for the funeral when the explosion struck.
A medical official said at least four women were among the fatalities, but no further details were immediately available.
Maliki and his family were killed by gunmen in Yarmuk, although there have been differing accounts of the attack itself.
A medic at Yarmuk hospital said the attackers burst into a real estate agency and killed three, while an interior ministry official said four people, including two real estate agents, died when gunmen opened fire on their car.
Violence in Iraq is down from its peak in 2006 and 2007, but attacks remain common. More than 200 people have been killed in attacks since American forces completed their pullout on December 18, according to an AFP tally.
Friday’s attack came a day after violence in Iraq killed 17 people, and is the deadliest to hit the country in nearly two weeks, amid a political crisis pitting the Shiite-led government against the main Sunni-backed bloc that has stoked sectarian tensions.
The row erupted when authorities charged Sunni Arab Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi with running a death squad and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite, called for his Sunni deputy Saleh al-Mutlak to be sacked after the latter said the premier was “worse than Saddam Hussein”.
In response, Hashemi and Mutlak’s Iraqiya bloc has largely boycotted the cabinet and parliament, and Hashemi, who denies the charges, has stayed in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, which has so far declined to hand him over.
The United Nations and the United States have urged calm and called for dialogue but oft-mooted talks among Iraq’s political leaders have yet to take place.
