A car bomb attack killed a top Shiite Muslim leader and up to 20 other people yesterday in an apparent assassination that dealt a further blow to the increasingly embattled US occupation of Iraq.
Supporters of the slain Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), blamed loyalists of Saddam Hussein for the carnage outside the main mosque in the holy city of Najaf.
SCIRI has been criticised by some Iraqi groups for cooperating with the US military occupation and Hakim had been viewed by Washington as a stabilising influence in postwar Iraq.
Thousands of people in Najaf thronged the streets outside the Imam Ali mosque, searching through rubble for victims. Three gutted and destroyed cars, two of them flipped over by the force of the blast, were strewn across the street beside the mosque.
"It happened shortly after prayers. It was a car bomb and up to 20 people were killed," Adel Abdul Mahdi, a SCIRI official, said in Baghdad after receiving reports from Najaf.
He said the bomb exploded as worshippers streamed out of the mosque after Friday prayers. A US military spokesman confirmed there had been a bomb.
"No coalition forces were in the area or on the ground because it is considered to be sacred ground," he said.
"Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim became a martyr," said his nephew Mohsen al-Hakim, who is also a top official of SCIRI, in Tehran. "Two cars exploded and caused his martyrdom."
The attack is the latest in a series of bloody incidents in Najaf, several of them aimed at religious leaders of the Shi'ite branch of Islam followed by a majority of Iraqis.
On Sunday three men were killed in a bombing that injured Hakim's uncle, also a cleric associated with SCIRI. Some SCIRI supporters blamed that bomb on a rival Shi'ite leader opposed to the presence of foreign troops.
The Shiite power struggle in Najaf is seen as one of the keys to the political future of Iraq, a majority of whose people are Shiites.
SCIRI officials said however they suspected remnants of Saddam's regime were behind yesterday's bombing.
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