Suicide bombings kill 170 in Iraq

A wave of suicide bombings and mortar attacks on vast crowds of Shi'ite worshippers killed at least 170 people in Baghdad and Kerbala yesterday, Iraq's bloodiest day since Saddam Hussein's fall.

Leaders of the country's 60 per cent Shi'ite majority said the bloodbaths were intended to ignite civil war. The Iraqi Governing Council blamed a Jordanian who Washington says is working for al Qaeda and trying to fuel chaos in Iraq.

The US military said three suicide bombers killed 58 people in Baghdad around the Kadhimiya mosque, and a suicide bomber, mortars and concealed bombs combined to kill at least 85 in Kerbala, a Shi'ite holy city 110 kilometres to the south. More than 400 were injured in the two cities.

The near-simultaneous attacks ripped through an annual ritual - banned under the Sunni Saddam - during which Shi'ites beat their heads and chests and cut their heads with swords to honour a revered figure killed in battle 1,324 years ago.

In Kerbala, where at least two million worshippers had gathered, rescuers raced through the streets with bodies stacked two or three deep on wooden carts, desperately searching for a doctor or an ambulance.

Shi'ites who earlier had ritually gashed open their heads with swords queued up to give blood to the wounded. Many of the victims were blown to pieces. A man's scalp and ear lay alongside rotting fruit.

In Baghdad, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, a Governing Council member and head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a leading Shi'ite party, said his group's militia had thwarted a similar attack in the holy city of Najaf. They also confiscated rocket-propelled grenades and mortars from cars in Kerbala, he said.

Several Governing Council members blamed the blasts on Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian whom Washington suspects of being behind a series of major attacks in Iraq.

US forces have placed a $10 million bounty on his head. They said last month they had intercepted a computer disc with a letter from Mr Zarqawi urging suicide bomb attacks on Shi'ites to inflame sectarian tension in Iraq.

"This was a clear and tragically well organised act of terrorism," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of operations for the US Army in Iraq, told a news conference.