At least 16 killed, including seven from the same family, and 76 wounded amid increasing sectarian tensions
Share 11
inShare1
Email
Reuters in Baghdad
guardian.co.uk, Monday 31 December 2012 10.03 GMT
Iraq
Shia pilgrims march along the main highway that links the Iraqi capital Baghdad with the central shrine city of Karbala on 31 December 2012. Sectarian and political tensions in the country are fuelling violence. Photograph: Ali Al-Saadi/AFP/Getty Images
Explosions across Iraq killed at least 16 people and wounded 76 on Monday, police said, amid a growing political crisis that is inflaming sectarian tensions.
Seven people from the same family were killed by bomb blasts near their home in the town of Mussayab, south of Baghdad.
In the Shia Muslim majority city of Hilla in the north, a parked car bomb went off near the convoy of the governor of Babil province, missing him but killing another person, police said.
"We heard the sound of a big explosion and the windows of our office shattered. We immediately lay on the ground," said 28-year-old Mohammed Ahmed, who works at a hospital near the site of the explosion.
"After a few minutes I stood up and went to the windows to see what happened. I saw flames and people lying on the ground."
In Baghdad, five people were killed by a parked car bomb targeting pilgrims before a Shia Muslim religious rite this week, police and hospital sources said.
Monday's violence also included a series of blasts that killed three people in Iraq's disputed territories, over which both the central government and the autonomous Kurdish region claim jurisdiction.
Two of those deaths were in the oil-rich, ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, where a bomb exploded as a police team tried to defuse it.
Violence in Iraq has eased since the carnage of 2006-2007, but attacks still take place on an almost daily basis.
