At least 45 people were killed, most of them children, and 200 wounded in a string of car bombings in and around Baghdad yesterday, medics and the US military said.
Most of the casualties were children who had gathered to watch a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new water-pumping station in a working-class district in the southwest of Baghdad when two car bombs exploded.
Almost simultaneously, another car bomb went off near an Iraqi national guard checkpoint about 1km south of the water-pumping station.
Clouds of black smoke billowed into the air above the site of the attacks, which were quickly closed off by the US military and Iraqi forces. A dozen burnt-out cars and a wrecked bus littered the tarmac.
Iraqi Health Minister Alaadin Sahab Adwan said the three bombs claimed the lives of 42 people and wounded 200, while the morgue director at Yarmouk Hospital said some 37 of the victims were children hit by shrapnel.
Local hospitals struggled to treat the scores of victims, as pools of blood formed on the floor. One boy lay swathed in bandages on a stretcher, his severed leg beside him. A witness who identified himself as Abu Sufian said he helped pull out the corpses of 32 children from the rubble.
He said the first car bomb was followed by the firing of an anti-tank missile just before the second exploded, adding that he saw a US military convoy passing by at the time of the blasts.
Earlier, one US soldier and two Iraqi policemen were killed in a car bombing west of Baghdad that also wounded 10 Iraqis and three US soldiers.
The Iraqi health ministry said 60 people were wounded from the first car bomb which occurred at 9:45am between Baghdad and Abu Ghraib to the west.
In northern Iraq, another car bomb blew up near an Iraqi police convoy in the center of Tal Afar, a rebellious town close to the Syrian border. Hospital officials said four civilians had been killed and 16 wounded. Four policemen were also hurt.
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