Baghdad blasts kill 57 amid confusion over cause
The death toll from a series of massive explosions in a crowded Baghdad neighourhood has climbed to 57, amid controversy over the cause of the blasts.
While the US military blamed an accident on a gas main for the disaster, Iraqi authorities insisted that insurgents had fired rockets into the largely Shiite district of Zafaraniyah and had detonated at least two bombs.
Whatever the true cause of the blasts, the carnage increased political tensions in the war torn Iraqi capital, as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed Sunni extremists for "this ugly crime".
Major General William Caldwell, the chief spokesman for the US-led coalition forces in Iraq, told reporters that American explosives experts believed that a major gas explosion had triggered the blasts.
"Our explosives specialists reported today that it was a very significant gas explosion on the first floor of the building," he said on Monday.
"The secondary explosions were the result of that. There is no evidence substantiating that something else was involved. Everything now points out that it was an internal gas explosion that set off a series of other explosions."
The US position differed completely from that of the Iraqi government.
"Our information was based on a report given to us by the interior ministry," said Ali Hussein, an official in the media relations department of the Council of Ministers office, part of Maliki's government.
"There were three explosions. The first was a Katyusha rocket fired at a market. Then a car bomb exploded 100 metres away from the first explosion," he said of the first blasts, which brought down a four-storey building.
"Then an explosive went off in another building," he said, suggesting that the US experts had been referring to this second explosion in their analysis.
Maliki accused Sunni extremists aiming to ignite civil war.
"We strongly condemn the series of terrorist attacks which were carried out by takfiri (hardline Sunni) terrorists on Sunday, which killed dozens of people," the Shiite premier said in a statement.
"The terrorists planned this ugly crime to kill as many innocent victims as possible and this is evidence of their hatred for Iraq and their attempt to incite division and sectarian fighting among Iraqi people," he warned.
An interior ministry official said insurgents lobbed missiles into Zafaraniyah then dispatched suicide bombers. At least four major buildings, including a four-storey apartment block, were demolished.
He put the toll at 57 dead and more than 150 wounded, but said this was expected to rise further. "There's children, women. Whole families were killed," the official told AFP.
The deadly carnage saw Shiite supporters of the radical anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr demand the formation of armed self-defence units.
Saheb al-Ameri from Sadr's Najaf office said government should "reactivate the role of the popular committees besides purging the security apparatus of dubious elements who use their official status to implement criminal acts."
Baghdad is in the grip of a dirty war between rival sectarian gangs and insurgents targeting US-led coalition forces and Maliki's government.
Previous attacks on this scale have been blamed on Sunni rebels -- some of them supporters of ousted president Saddam Hussein, others Islamist extremists, all bitterly opposed to the United States and the Shiite prime minister.
Shiite death squads have played a leading role in a wave of tit-for-tat sectarian murders in Baghdad, where the city morgue handles 50 corpses of gunshot and torture victims every day.
The US military on Monday accused Iranian groups of training and arming "Shiite extremists" in Iraq.
"We have found ammunition, weapons from Iran with recent manufacturing dates," Caldwell told reporters. "We have verified. It did come from Iran."
Meanwhile, at least 12 people were killed in Iraq on Monday. Three civilians died in three bomb attacks in downtown Baghdad, police said, while gun attacks roiund the country left nine more dead.
Four Australian soldiers were wounded in a rocket attack on the fortified Green Zone, the seat of Maliki's government and home to the US and British embassies.
AFP
