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BAGHDAD : A spate of powerful car bombs in Baghdad and Iraq's southern port city of Basra killed at least nine people on Tuesday, a day after a suicide bomber killed 28 people in a Baquba mosque.
In the Iraqi capital, where the number of bomb attacks has dropped since a "surge" of US troops onto its streets six months ago, a double car bombing killed six people and wounded at least 20, security and medical officials said.
The devices exploded almost simultaneously in mid-morning outside Al-Rafidain bank in Zayunah, a mixed inner neighbourhood.
"The blasts occurred 30 seconds apart," a security official said.
In the port city of Basra, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the wheel of a car outside police headquarters, local police chief General Jalil Khalaf told AFP.
Three people - one a policeman - were killed and five others were wounded, the general said, while a hospital official confirmed the deaths but said 20 more were wounded, among them six policemen.
The overwhelmingly Shiite city of Basra has been the scene of bloody inter-Shiite rivalry between radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's militia, Abdel Aziz Hakim's Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, and the Fadhila party.
The security forces, especially the police, have been widely infiltrated by the Shiite militias whose rivalry over control of southern Iraq's largest city has escalated since British forces withdrew in early September.
Police in the restive city of Baquba north of Baghdad, meanwhile, revised the toll from a devastating suicide bombing on Monday evening in a village mosque to 28 killed and 34 wounded.
The attack targeted a reconciliation meeting between two feared militias at Shifta village west of Baquba during the evening meal that breaks the daytime fast observed by Muslims during Ramadan.
Seven policemen, including three high-ranking officers, were killed when the suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest in the crowded mosque.
"We have a total of 28 people killed and 34 wounded," police Brigadier General Khaider al-Timimi told AFP, updating an earlier toll.
His figures were confirmed by the chief of the morgue in Baquba, Ahmed Fouad.
An Iraqi security official said the reconciliation meeting was between the Shiite Mahdi Army militia and the Sunni insurgent group, the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution.
In recent months the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution has joined forces with the US military in securing volatile Sunni Arab regions across Iraq.
A senior US military commander said last week that violence across Iraq has fallen to its lowest level since before the bombing of a Shiite mosque in February 2006 that sparked savage sectarian bloodletting.
Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, the number two commander of US-led forces in Iraq, told a news conference in Baghdad there has also been a 50 percent fall-off in violence in Baghdad since January.
"There are still way too many civilian casualties inside of Baghdad and Iraq," Odierno added, however. - AFP/de
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