Six pilgrims killed in Iraq blast

A car bomb killed six pilgrims today in the latest deadly attack on Shias on their way to mark religious rituals in a holy Iraqi city, police and hospital officials said.

Authorities said 13 people were wounded in the morning blast in a car park where busloads of pilgrims were staying on the outskirts of Karbala, a city 55 miles south of the capital Baghdad.

A second bomb was discovered nearby and dismantled before it could explode, police said.

The attack followed a triple suicide bombing last week along two roads leading to Karbala that killed 56 people and injured at least 180 – most of them Shia pilgrims.

Millions of pilgrims have gathered in Karbala to mark tonight’s end of Arbaeen, a 40-day mourning period to observe the 7th-century death of the Imam Hussein, one of the Shia sect’s most revered figures.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for last Thursday’s bombing, but suicide attacks are the trademark of the Islamic State of Iraq, an al-Qaida front group believed to be made up mostly of Sunni religious extremists.

Meanwhile, police said two bombs in Baghdad killed an Iraqi army intelligence officer and his driver and wounded eight bystanders in separate strikes that hit a Shia and a Sunni neighbourhood.

Hospital officials in Baghdad confirmed the fatalities.

Elsewhere, a roadside bomb exploded near Tikrit as Salahuddin provincial governor Ahmed Abdullah al-Jubouri’s motorcade was driving by, wounding five of his bodyguards, said police spokesman Hatam Akram.

The governor was not injured in the blast near Saddam Hussein’s hometown, 80 miles north of Baghdad.