A fresh explosion has echoed across central Baghdad after four suicide bombings killed at least 34 people, including International Red Cross staff and policemen, earlier today.
No details were immediately available on the exact location and cause of the this afternoon's blast.
The attacks at the International Red Cross headquarters and two police stations this morning shook the city after three US soldiers were killed in separate attacks overnight.
At least two of the morning explosions appeared to have been suicide bombings, with an ambulance used in the Red Cross bombing.
Iraq's police chief Ahmad Ibrahim, who is also deputyinterior minister, told a news conference 26 of the 34 dead werecivilians and eight police. Sixty-five police and 159 civilianswere wounded.The Red Cross said 12 were killed at their HQ, and police said 27 were killedin the police station bombings, most of them Iraqis.
The Red Cross is now considering whether or not to cut back on its operations in Iraq at a meeting in Geneva. However, the head of theInternational Committee of the Red Cross office in Baghdad, Mr Pierre Gassmann, said he would not be seeking any military protection from the US-led occupying force.
The blasts come a day after a rocket attack on Baghdad's Al Rashid Hotel, where a senior US official was staying, left one person dead and 18 injured.
The explosions, sirens and smoke plunged Baghdad into fear and chaos at the outset of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
The series of attacks "is not only criminal, it's sacrilegious", US Brigadier General Mark Hertling said.
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American troops and Iraqi police rushed into the neighbourhood and cordoned off the area. The Red Cross said there were casualties among its staff. There were normally about 100 people, mostly Iraqis, working in the building.
"We don't understand why somebody would attack the Red Cross," a spokeswoman for the agency said. "It's very hard to understand."
The International Red Cross has been working in Iraq since 1980 and "has not been involved in any politics", she said.
The attack came hours after the Anglo-American coalition declared its determination to rebuild Iraq despite a rocket attack on the Al Rashid Hotel.
President George W. Bush insisted today the United States had no intention of leaving Iraq despite the latest attacks.
"It's in the national interest of the United States that a peaceful Iraq emerge and we will stay the course in order to achieve this objective," Mr Bush told reporters after meeting at the White House with the US administrator in Iraq, Mr Paul Bremer.
US Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell pledged following yesterday's attack that the security situation would have to be controlled although the level of attacks was unexpected. "We have much work ahead of us, and we will not shrink from this work," he said.
US Deputy Defence Secretary Mr Paul Wolfowitz, who was staying in the Al Rashid Hotel at the time, escaped injury. Looking shaken by the incident, the Pentagon deputy later told journalists in Baghdad that the attack "will not deter us from completing our mission" in Iraq.