Mathrubhumi - English News - Car bombings kill 34 in Baghdad

Baghdad: A spate of bloody car bombings rocked mainly Shiite districts of Baghdad today, killing at least 34 people in what the US military said appeared to be coordinated attacks by Al-Qaeda jihadists.

Nearly 140 people were wounded in the attacks which recalled the blackest days of violence in the capital.

A total of six car bombs shattered the city's fragile security situation just as British business minister Peter Mandelson arrived in Baghdad. Among the dead were at least two women and a baby.

During the morning rush hour 10 people were killed and 65 wounded when a booby-trapped car exploded in a market area of
the

impoverished Shiite district of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.

In Allawi, a mixed Sunni and Shiite district in the centre, six people were killed and 25 others wounded by another car bomb. Most of the victims were workers waiting for jobs, a defence ministry official said.

Emergency teams moved in fast to clean up the pieces of twisted metal and the remains of a mangled white sedan.
Storefronts were closed, many of them damaged. A car bomb targeting the convoy of a senior interior ministry official killed one civilian and a policeman and wounded six other policemen in the southeastern Shiite neighbourhood of New Baghdad. (AFP)