Iraq bombings, clashes kill 62

BAGHDAD - A spate of bombings across Iraq and a fresh surge of fighting between Shia militiamen and US forces in eastern Baghdad killed at least 62 people on Tuesday, Iraqi officials said.
A car bomb outside a courthouse in the central city of Baquba, a stronghold of Al-Qaeda, killed at least 40 people and wounded 80 in the most devastating attack in the violence-wracked country in a month, police said.
Medical officials said many of the victims were charred beyond recognition and people were crowding the local hospital trying to identify the remains of relatives.
Three minibuses were destroyed and 10 houses damaged in the blast, which sparked pandemonium, an AFP correspondent said.
“At least 40 people were killed, including one woman and a police officer, when a car bomb exploded outside the main courtroom in Baquba,” said a police official who would not be named.
“At least 80 other people were wounded, among them women and children,” he added.
Dr Ahmed Fuad at the local hospital in Baquba, 60 kilometres (35 miles) north of Baghdad, confirmed the toll.
“At least 40 people have been killed and most of them were burnt beyond recognition,” he told AFP.
Baquba, capital of the central province of Diyala, is one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq and regarded as an Al-Qaeda stronghold.
Since early January, US and Iraqi forces have been engaged in intensive operations against the jihadists throughout Diyala province.
Soon after the car bomb attack, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives in a restaurant in the western city of Ramadi killing 13 people, the city’s police chief said.
Major General Tareq al-Youssef said another 14 people were wounded in the attack which occurred at around 12:30 pm (0930 GMT).
He said the restaurant was near the western outskirts of the city, the capital of Sunni Anbar province.
Ramadi, 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of Baghdad, was a key Sunni insurgent stronghold in the aftermath of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime by US-led forces in 2003.
But since 2006 local Sunni tribes there have sided with the US military to fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq militants and the violence had dropped substantially.
Security officials in Baghdad, meanwhile, reported two workers killed and two policemen wounded on Tuesday by a roadside bomb planted near a police station in Baghdad’s central Karrada neighbourhood.
A later car bomb also in Karrada killed one person and wounded six others, including four policemen.
Since Monday, more than 80 people have been killed in a surge of insurgent attacks across Iraq, which come at a time security forces are fighting street battles with Shiite militiamen in Baghdad’s Sadr City.
Renewed fighting on Tuesday between Shiite militiamen, mostly linked to radical Shiite cleric Moqtad al-Sadr, and security forces killed six people, the American military told AFP.
“Coalition forces took on small arms fire during an operation in As Sudayrah early Tuesday,” the military said referring to an area inside Sadr City.
It added that in return fire, coalition forces killed three gunmen.
Later, US troops called in air support as the clashes continued, the military said, adding in the ensuing firefight three more “enemy fighters” were killed.
Shiite militiamen have been engaged in sustained clashes with US and Iraqi forces for more than a week in Sadr City in which around 95 people have been killed.
The firefights began when US and Iraqi forces started operations in the sprawling slum to stop lethal rocket and mortar attacks from the district towards the Green Zone, the seat of the Iraqi government and site of the US embassy.
The US military claims that between March 23 and April 12 at least 596 rockets and mortars rounds were fired towards the Green Zone, many of them missing the target and killing Iraqi civilians.
Four Americans, including two soldiers, were killed in the attacks.