- BAGHDAD/KERBALA, Iraq (Reuters)
-- At least 143 people died in a wave of coordinated attacks on millions
of Shi'ite worshippers in Baghdad and Kerbala Tuesday in the bloodiest
day in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's fall.
-
- The U.S. military said three suicide bombers killed 58
people in Baghdad around the Kadhimiya mosque, and a suicide bomber and
mortars combined to kill at least 85 in Kerbala, a Shi'ite holy city 68
miles south of Baghdad.
-
- The near-simultaneous attacks devastated an annual ritual
-- banned under the Sunni Saddam -- during which Shi'ites beat their heads
and chests and gash their heads with swords to honor a revered figure killed
in battle 1,324 years ago.
-
- In Kerbala, where two million worshippers had gathered,
rescuers raced through the streets with bodies laden two or three high
onto wooden vegetable carts, desperately searching for a doctor or an ambulance.
-
- Shi'ites who earlier had gashed open their heads with
swords queued up to give blood to the wounded.
-
- Many corpses were missing body parts. A man's scalp and
ear lay alongside rotting fruit and a muddied pool of water.
-
- No one claimed responsibility for the attacks. Leaders
of Iraq's 60 percent Shi'ite majority accused the attackers of trying to
ignite civil war.
-
- Several members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council
blamed the attacks on Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian whom Washington suspects
of working for al Qaeda inside Iraq.
-
- In a separate attack in Baghdad, guerrillas threw a bomb
at a U.S. military vehicle, killing one American soldier and seriously
wounding another, the army said. The death took to 379 the number of U.S.
soldiers killed in action since the start of the U.S.-led war in Iraq nearly
a year ago.
-
- It was the deadliest day since Saddam fell last April
9.
-
- In the bloodiest previous attack, on Feb. 1, two suicide
bombers walked into the offices of the two main Kurdish parties in Arbil,
northern Iraq, and blew themselves up, killing at least 101 people.
-
- Shi'ites also were targeted in southwestern Pakistan
where at least 37 people were killed and more than 150 wounded on Tuesday
in an attack by suspected Sunni Muslim radicals, hospital sources said.
-
- WHO TO BLAME?
-
- Unsure who to blame, survivors in Baghdad hurled stones
at U.S. troops who arrived on the scene.
-
- In Kerbala, enraged Shi'ites turned on Iranian pilgrims
after the blasts -- even though an Iranian Interior Ministry official said
40 to 50 Iranians were among the dead and wounded in the attacks on the
two cities.
-
- U.S. forces in Iraq said last month they had intercepted
a computer disc with a letter from Zarqawi urging suicide bomb attacks
on Shi'ites to inflame sectarian tension in Iraq.
-
- "The civil war and sectarian strife that Zarqawi
wants to inflict on the people of Iraq will not succeed. Zarqawi failed,
his gang and their evil plans have failed," Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, a
Shi'ite Governing Council member, told a news conference.
-
- "Sunnis, Shi'ites, Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, all
Iraqis are determined to move forward," he said. "United we stand
and we go forward to build a new Iraq."
-
- The U.S. military said in a statement that "those
initiating these attacks are cowards and terrorists." Officers said
they had no information on who was behind the attacks.
-
- "The people behind this act are what remains of
the regime, backed by people like al Qaeda with the goal of igniting civil
strife, but we and the rest of the Iraqi people are aware of this danger
and will not succumb to it," said Hamid al-Bayati, a senior official
in the Shi'ite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
-
- Monday, the competing religious and ethnic groups in
the Governing Council forged an interim constitution, putting aside differences
over the role of Islam, representation for women and Kurdish demands for
autonomy.
-
- The Shi'ite ceremonies Tuesday mark Ashura, which according
to tradition commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, Prophet Mohammad's
grandson.
-
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