83 killed in bomb attacks on shrines

At least 83 people were killed after a series of co-ordinated blasts struck major Shiite Muslim shrines in the Iraqi city of Karbala and in Baghdad today, as thousands of pilgrims converged on the climactic day of their most important religious festival.

Dozens of people were wounded in the blasts.

There were varying reports on the cause of the blasts. Stunned witnesses blamed suicide bombers or planted explosives. A US spokesman in Baghdad said the military was investigating the possibility the blasts in the capital were caused by mortars.

Insurgents also threw a grenade into a US Army Humvee as it drove down a Baghdad road, killing one 1st Armoured Division soldier and wounding another.

At least 31 people were killed and 100 wounded in the Karbala attacks, police officer Muhammad Saad said.

In the Iraqi capital, four hospitals reported 52 killed in the Baghdad blasts, though an unknown number of victims were also taken to other facilities. Deputy Interior Minister Ahmed Kadhum Ibrahim reported 56 dead in Baghdad.

The attacks sparked a wave of Shiite outrage – much of it directed at US troops in the Iraqi capital.

Iraqis attacked US Army medics trying to help wounded. Throwing stones, the Iraqis chased the US troops back into their high-walled compound near the blast area then tried to storm the gates.

Soldiers threw smoke grenades and fired shotguns into the air to drive the mob off.

Two soldiers suffered broken bones when a crowd pelted their Humvees with a hail of stones outside the Kazimiya shrine.

In Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, five large blasts went off shortly after 10am near the golden-domed shrine of Imam Hussein, one of Shiite Islam’s most beloved saints, and another shrine. The explosions hurled bodies in all directions and sending crowds of pilgrims fleeing in panic.

Dead and wounded were loaded on to wooden carts normally used to ferry elderly pilgrims to holy sites. Bodies ripped apart by the force of the blasts lay on the streets.

At about the same time, three explosions rocked the inside and outside of the Kazimiya shrine in Baghdad, which contains the tombs of two other saints, Imam Mousa Kazem and his grandson Imam Muhammad al-Jawad.

Panicked men and women, dressed in black, fled screaming and weeping as ambulances raced to the scene.

The Ashoura festival, which marks the killing of Hussein in a seventh century battle, is the most important religious period in Shiite Islam and draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and other Shiite communities to the Iraqi shrines.

On August 29, a massive car bomb detonated at the Imam Ali shrine as worshippers emerged from Friday prayers, killing more than 85 people, including Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammed Ba