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Car bombs in Iraq kill more than 110 people

Car bombs have killed more than 110 people, 25 of them children, in a surge of violence in Iraq ahead of an Oct. 15 referendum on a new constitution.

One of the four car bombs ripped through a crowded market in the southern town of Hilla, killing at least 12 people and wounding 47 yesterday, officials said.

The vehicle was parked when it detonated at about 9:30am in the city 95km south of Baghdad.

As Iraqi police and soldiers sealed off the Al-Sharia vegetable market, emergency workers lifted wounded victims and dead bodies into ambulances from streets covered with pools of blood and shattered vegetable stands.

In the mainly Shiite town of Balad, north of Baghdad, the death toll from three huge car bombs on Thursday rose to 98 yesterday, hospital director Kassim Aboud said.

At least 119 others were injured.

Apparently aimed at killing a large number of Shiite civilians, the string of bombings started just before sunset on Thursday when the first blast ripped through an open-air market crowded with people buying vegetables. The next bomb exploded at a bank just meters away, followed by a third on a nearby street of clothing shops.

Most of the fatalities were civilians, though the wounded included the police chief and four officers, said the director of Balad hospital.

Furious Balad residents blamed the attacks on "foreign fighters," long accused by the US military of infiltrating Iraq from Syria to carry out attacks across the country.

"What have those Jordanians and Palestinians and Saudis got to do with us? Shame on them!" said Abu Waleed, a hotel owner who said seven people staying in his hotel died in the blasts.

Five US soldiers were also killed in a bombing near Ramadi, the US Army said on Thursday.
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