Relatives prepare to bury dead from funeral bombing

Angry, weeping relatives prepared today to bury dozens of people killed in a suicide attack at a funeral in Mosul.

The bloodshed came as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad said they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government.

Hundreds of men, women and children crowded the main hospital in Mosul, trying to find and identify the 47 dead and more than 100 wounded in yesterday’s blast at a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners.

“I cannot describe the amount of despair I feel,” said Sher Qassim Mohammed Ali. “I lost seven of my sons, brothers and cousins. I want to know who carried out this attack … we will avenge those who did it.”

With a dozen bodies covered in blankets laying in the cold outside a morgue that had no space for them, others screamed “This is a crime! This is a crime!” One man said: “May God avenge them.”

Shiite mosques and funerals have become a frequent target of Sunni-led insurgents.

Last month, suicide bombers attacked a number of them during the Shiite commemoration of Ashoura, killing nearly 100 people.

Family members and politicians agreed there would be no joint funeral in Mosul on Saturday because of the “fear of another attack like this one”, said Hamid Ali Qassim, a member of the Al-Sadr Movement of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militants rose up against US troops several times in 2004.

Instead, families will hold private funerals across the city, he said.