Car bombs targeting Shiite pilgrims in the Iraqi capital killed at least 32 people yesterday, officials said, marring commemorations for a revered Shiite imam attended by tens of thousands.

Car parts were blown more than 100 metres

An interior ministry official said a car bomb exploded at about 11.15 a.m. on a highway near Shuala in north Baghdad, killing 14 people and wounding 32, while a second car bomb exploded at the Aden intersection near Kadhimiyah about 2 p.m., killing 18 people and wounding 36.

A medical source said Baghdad hospitals had received nine bodies and 47 wounded people from the first attack, and 25 bodies and 105 wounded from the second.

The attacks came as tens of thousands of Shiite pilgrims flocked to the Kadhimiyah area for the climax of commemorations marking the death in 799 of Imam Musa Kadhim, the seventh of 12 revered imams, who is said to have been poisoned.

Fadhel al-Anbari, secretary general of the Imam Kadhim shrine, said at a news conference that six million people had participated in the commemorations which began about a week ago.

The Baghdad Operations Command said in a statement that the first attack was a suicide bombing, and that security forces had arrested a man who accompanied the bomber but got out of the vehicle before the explosion.

And a police first lieutenant at the scene of the second blast said that it was also a suicide bombing that hit a minibus carrying pilgrims.

An AFP journalist said there were four burned cars and two minibuses at the scene of the first blast, one of which was completely destroyed.

Car parts were blown more than 100 metres from the site.

“We took many people out from the buses, and all of them were burned,” one man who had been serving water to pilgrims said, declining to give his name.

Some were screaming, while others appeared to be dead.