A suicide bomber inside a Shi'ite mosque and another outside blew themselves up, killing 79 people in Baghdad on Friday, police said.
Updated at 9.50 pm
BAGHDAD: A suicide bomber inside a Shi'ite mosque and another outside blew themselves up, killing 79 people in Baghdad on Friday, police said.
The blasts wounded 164 people.
A witness said there were many wounded. The Shi'ite Muslim Forat Television station said three mortar bombs targeted the mosque that belongs to SCIRI, a party in the dominant Shi'ite alliance.
Immediately after the attack Iraqi authorities appealed on state television for public blood donations.
An Iraqi security official said two of the three bombers were disguised as women.
Iraqi and US military forces quickly cordoned off the entire area as dozens of pick-up trucks, ambulances and private vehicles started to ferry the victims to hospitals.
Victims were also carried away in handcarts and blankets, as men, beating their chests in grief, searched for relatives who had attended the prayers at the mosque.
The blasts follow a car bombing near a sacred Shi'ite shrine in the southern city of Najaf on Thursday that killed 13 people.
Sectarian tension has been running high since the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine on February 22 touched off reprisals and pushed Iraq to the brink of a sectarian civil war.
A deadlock over the new Iraqi government four months after elections has left a political vacuum that has raised fears it will play into the hands of Arab Sunni insurgents and fuel communal tension.
United States and Iraqi officials said spectacular suicide bombings in Iraq are part of a campaign by Al Qaeda militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to draw majority Shi'ites into a full-blown sectarian conflict.
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