By Xinhua
Baghdad : The casualty toll from a suicide bombing in Iraq’s Shiite holy city of Karbala on Monday rose to 43killed and 70 people wounded, an Interior Ministry source said on Tuesday.
“The latest reports we have said that 43 people were killed and70 others were wounded by the suicide bomb attack in Karbala on Monday,” the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
Earlier, Alaa Humood, head of Karbala’s health office, also put the toll at 43 killed and 73 others injured by the blast in which a female suicide bomber blew up explosive belt at a busy coffee shop in an area near the shrine of Imam Hussein in the city, some110 km south of Baghdad.
Humood said that four Iranians were among the killed and eight others among the wounded.
But Karbala’s Police Chief Brig. Gen. Raed Shakir Jawdat deniedon Tuesday that it was a suicide attack, saying a home-made bomb had been planted in the area.
The explosion came as U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was paying a surprise visit to Iraq.
Suicide bombings involving women have been increasing recently. A female suicide bomber was blamed for one of the bloody attacks in two Baghdad markets in early February which killed nearly 100people.
On March 10, a woman suicide bomber detonated her explosive vest, killing a Sunni tribal leader in the Diyala province.
The U.S. military said early this year that violence had dropped by about 60 percent since last June. However, a string of attacks struck the country over the past three months, raising fears of a comeback of violence.