By Xinhua,
Baghdad : Up to 24 people were killed and some 62 others injured in three suicide bomb attacks, targeting Shiite pilgrims in central Baghdad on Monday, an Interior Ministry source said.
The source confirmed to Xinhua that a total of 24 people were killed and 62 others injured, most of them were Shiite pilgrims.
The attacks took place in the morning when three women suicide bombers struck groups of Shiite pilgrims in the neighborhood of Karrada, the source said.
A female suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest blew herself up among a group of pilgrims near the National Theater in the neighborhood, the source said.
A second woman suicide bomber struck another crowd of pilgrims near the Kahramana Square in Karrada, while a third woman suicide bomber hit another group of pilgrims near the Musa Bin Nasir fuel station in the same neighborhood, the source added.
Thousands of pilgrims were travelling on foot from Baghdad neighborhoods and other Iraqi cities to the holy Shiite district of Kadhimiya in northern Baghdad.
Two traffic policemen and a women were among the killed, while six traffic policemen, three women and two children were among the wounded people, the source said.
The blasts also set fire to eight civilian cars and several nearby shops, he said.
Earlier, the source put the toll at 19 killed and 43 others injured.
On Sunday, police said that gunmen opened fire on Shiite pilgrims, who were traveling on foot in the town of Madain, some 30 km south of Baghdad, killing seven of them.
On August 31, 2005, some 1,000 Shiite pilgrims were crushed to death or drowned in Tigris River in a stampede on a Baghdad bridge as vast crowds of them were sent into panic by rumors of suicide bombers in their midst.
Hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims converge every year from Iraqi cities and Shiite Muslim countries, particularly Iran, at the mausoleum of Imam Musa al-Kadhim, to commemorate the death of the seventh of the twelve Shiite Imams.
Kadhim’s tomb is in a golden-domed mosque in the center of the old part of the Kadhimiya district.