IRAQ: 61 confirmed dead after a double suicide bombing of a market in Hilla

A scene of utter devastation remained on Friday (February 2) in the centre of Hilla, a city about 95 kilometres (60 miles) south of Baghdad. Two suicide bombers killed 61 people and wounded 150 when they blew themselves up at a crowded market in Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim town of Hilla on Thursday (February 1), police said. People worked on Friday to cleanup the wreckage left behind by the bombs and hundreds were being treated at a nearby hospital. The blasts, along with bomb and mortar attacks in Baghdad that killed 11 people, underscored the challenges for the government of Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who has pledged a U.S.-backed crackdown in the lawless capital. The data from an Interior Ministry official, widely viewed as an indicative but only partial record of violent deaths, showed 1,971 people died from attacks in Iraq in January, slightly up from the previous high of 1,930 deaths in December. The first suicide bomber in Hilla, 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, blew himself up when police tried to frisk him outside the central market, police said. A second suicide bomber struck soon afterwards witnesses confirmed. "The first blast happened here and the second blast was there. People ran away from all sides and when they ran away from that side, the blast took place next to them," said eyewitness Basem. In Baghdad on Thursday, a minibus in the religiously mixed Baghdad district of Karrada exploded, wrecking the vehicle and killing six people and wounding 12. A car bomb in Rusafi, one of Baghdad's biggest shopping districts, killed three people and wounded seven. Police said 10 mortar bombs hit Adhamiya, a mainly Sunni Arab area in northwest Baghdad, killing two people and wounding nine. Thousands of U.S. troops are being sent to Baghdad to help Iraqi security forces in what is being widely seen as a final attempt to avert all-out sectarian civil war between Iraq's Shi'ite majority and Sunnis once dominant under Saddam Hussein.

ITN Source | February 3, 2007

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