Up to 60people were killed in three apparently co-ordinated car bomb attacks in the mixed Shia and Sunni Arab town of Balad north of Baghdad today, Iraqi police sources said.
They said the first two bombs went off 10 minutes apart at dusk near a busy market in a predominantly Shia area, in a street with a bank and next to a police station in the town about 90 km north of the capital.
A third bomb went off about half an hour later, one police source said. Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgents frequently target the majority Shia community for attack, striking Shia neighbourhoods, towns and mosques.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, one of the most feared militant groups, has pledged to wage "all out war" on the Shia community, an apparent effort to provoke sectarian civil war and drive the country further into chaos.
This week, five Shia teachers in a school south of Baghdad, were dragged away by unknown gunmen and shot dead.
Last month, more than 100 part-time labourers living in the Shia Baghdad district of Kadhamiya, were killed in a suicide bomb blast, the deadliest single attack since the war began.
Balad, the site of a major US military air base, is just a few kilometres north of the town of Dujail, a Shia town which is the focus of the forthcoming trial of Saddam Hussein.
Agencies