Evening attacks on Shiites kill 24: Iraq officials

Baghdad: Evening attacks against Shiites in Iraq killed at least 24 people and wounded 49, Iraqi officials said on Friday, in the latest attempt by insurgents to exacerbate the country`s renewed sectarian tensions.

The attacks raised the death toll from a series of attacks yesterday, which included assaults on police stations in the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah west of Baghdad, to 40. In one of the attacks authorities described today, a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden motorcycle into a funeral tent for a Shiite family in the town of in Muqdadiyah, about 90 kilometers north of Baghdad. That explosion killed 13 people and wounded 24, officials said. In the northern town of Dujail, about 80 kilometers from Baghdad, a parked car bomb went off outside a Shiite mosque late yesterday. As people gathered around the blast site, another bomb went off. The twin bombing killed at least 11 people and wounded 25, said the town mayor, Nayif al-Khazrachi. Two medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to talk to the media. The killings are the latest in a wave of bloodshed that has claimed the lives of more than 2,600 people since the start of April. The months-long eruption of violence, Iraq`s worst in half a decade, is raising fears the country is again returning to the brink of a civil war pitting its Sunni and Shiite Muslim sects against one another. PTI