15 killed in car bomb attack on Shia mosque

A CAR bomb killed ten people and wounded 15 others at a Shiite mosque in Baghdad yesterday.

The explosion at the al-Subeih mosque in an eastern district of the Iraqi capital came as prayers were ending.

"I was rushing to the mosque in my car for Friday prayers when I heard a big blast," a witness said.

"I ran inside and started carrying the bodies of those who were killed. My clothes were covered in blood."

A wall of the building appeared to have been knocked down by the blast and a water cistern inside the mosque burst. Blood mixed with the water formed large red pools, TV pictures showed.

Rescuers carried the bodies away in wheelbarrows. A passenger bus parked outside the building was destroyed, although no-one was in it at the time.

It was the latest in a series of explosions outside both Shiite and Sunni mosques in Iraq over the past year, amid tensions between the country’s two main religious denominations.

Ties have grown strained in the wake of the elections that brought the once-persecuted Shiite majority to power, at the expense of the Sunni minority that dominated under Saddam Hussein.

As well as attacks on mosques, insurgents have also bombed Christian churches in an effort to scare away Iraq’s small Christian community.