A SERIES of bombs rocked mainly Shi’ite areas of Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 60 people and wounding dozens two days after al-Qaida militants staged a bloodbath when they took hostages in a Christian church.

THREE bombs ripped through a Shi’ite Muslim religious procession in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore yesterday, killing 25 people and wounding about 150 others, officials said.

A SUICIDE bomber blew himself up outside a textile factory yesterday in a crowd that gathered after two car bombings at the same spot in the worst of a series of attacks that killed at least 84 people across Iraq, the deadliest day this year.

ISRAELI air strikes reduced entire apartment buildings to rubble and plunged parts of the Lebanese capital of Beirut into darkness in a ferocious response to a Hezbollah attack.

A SUICIDE car bomb tore through buses carrying Iranian pilgrims near a Shi’ite shrine in the holy city of Kufa yesterday, killing as many as 12 people and wounding 39.

A SUICIDE bomber lured a crowd of Shi’ite Muslim day labourers to his minivan and blew it up in Baghdad yesterday, killing 114 people in the bloodiest of a wave of attacks which killed more than 150 across the capital.

NEW suicide bombings killed at least 22 people in the Baghdad area yesterday, while relatives struggled to identify charred bodies from a fiery suicide attack near a Shi’ite mosque in Musayyib that killed more than 90 people.

DOZENS of international aid agencies considered quitting Iraq yesterday following the abduction of two Italian women, as the US military death toll rose above 1,000.

THE besieged Shi’ite city of Fallujah was rocked again by a series of explosions and gunfire yesterday — only hours after a heavy battle in which US warplanes and artillery pounded insurgents holed up in a slum.

US FORCES in southern Iraq are braced for their biggest battle yet on the road to Baghdad – an expected clash near the Shi’ite holy city of Kerbala with elements of Iraq’s Republican Guard.