Add Your Photos and Video to This Story

Bombs near Baghdad Shiite mosques kills 24

by amyjudd | October 2, 2008 at 08:30 am | 23 views | add comment | 0 recommendations

As Shiite worshippers left two Baghdad mosques on Thursday, suicide bombers set off two bombs, killing 24 people and wounding more than 50 others.

Six Sunnis were also shot in a separate attack as they traveled in a minibus in the mostly Shiite town of Wajihiyah.

The dead were heading to Baquoba to visit relatives. They included two children, three women and a man, police in Diyala province said. Another woman and her small child were injured.

The bombings in Baghdad occurred as Shiite worshippers celebrated the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

No group claimed responsibility, but attacks on Shiite civilians are widely associated with Sunni extremists like al-Qaida in Iraq hoping to re-ignite the sectarian conflict that pushed the nation to the brink of civil war two years ago.

In the deadliest attack, a suicide car bomber in a white Mercedes sedan detonated his explosives about 20 yards from a mosque in Zafaraniyah in southeastern Baghdad. He set off the bomb when Iraqi soldiers tried to stop him from approaching the building, police said. That attack killed 14 people, including three Iraqi soldiers, and injured 28, police said.

In the other attack, a suicide bomber who appeared to be in his late teens detonated his explosive belt as worshippers were leaving the Rasoul mosque in the capital's eastern New Baghdad district.

Ten people died and 24 were injured, police and officials at the al-Kindi and Ibn al-Nasif hospitals said.