IRAQ:Gunmen opened fire on Shia pilgrims in southern Baghdad yesterday, killing seven, as thousands made their way to a revered shrine in the Iraqi capital, police said.
Iraqi forces have tightened security around the Kadhamiya district in northwestern Baghdad, where the shrine is located, ahead of a major Shia religious pilgrimage this week, an army spokesman said. Police said the pilgrims who were killed were on foot. They had apparently come from cities in southern Iraq, which is predominantly Shia.
Shia pilgrims have often been the target of Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda militants who consider Shiaism - the majority Muslim denomination in Iraq - heretical.
But recent Shia religious events have passed relatively peacefully as violence in Iraq has dropped to a four-year low.
The annual pilgrimage to the Kadhamiya area is expected to attract more pilgrims than usual because security has improved, said Maj-Gen Qassim Moussawi, spokesman for Iraqi forces in Baghdad.
"We expect at least a million people, definitely multiples of last year," Mr Moussawi said before reports emerged of the shooting of the seven pilgrims.
Thousands of pilgrims have already entered Baghdad for the event, which peaks on Tuesday and marks the death of one of Shia Islam's 12 imams.
The Kadhamiya pilgrimage was marred in 2005 by one of the worst losses of life in a single incident since the 2003 US-led invasion, when rumours of a bomb attack triggered a stampede among pilgrims crossing a bridge leading to the shrine. Up to 1,000 people were killed.
The bridge has been closed since but is expected to reopen soon after this year's pilgrimage.
In other violence, a bomb wounded a member of the Anbar provincial council and killed two of his bodyguards in Falluja yesterday, police said.