27 killed, 100 hurt in Baghdad blasts

The attacks came a day after authorities had lifted a curfew and a transportation ban on the capital.

Bombs killed at least 27 people and wounded more than 100 in three attacks in Baghdad Shiite neighbourhoods on Tuesday, a security official and medics said.

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Twenty-three died and scores were wounded when a suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives blew himself up next to people waiting to buy kerosene at a shop in the southeast district of Al-Amin, an interior ministry official said.

The others died in two car bomb attacks, one near a market in the central Karada district, the other by a post office in the southeastern Baghdad Jadida district, he added.

A spokesman at Al-Kindi hospital said 109 people had been admitted with wounds, along with "15 complete corpses and a number of body parts" from two explosions in east Baghdad.

The apparently coordinated attacks came a day after authorities had lifted a curfew and a transportation ban on the capital.

Earlier in the day gunmen planted a bomb at the entrance of the Sunni Al-Hurriya mosque, in the northern Al-Hurriya neighbourhood of the capital. The blast damaged the entrance to the building but caused no casualties.

The latest outbreak of violence follows days of sectarian bloodshed triggered by the bombing last Wednesday of a Shiite shrine in the northern town of Samarra.

Some 330 people have died in Baghdad since that bombing, an official at the Iraqi capital's main morgue said.

Earlier on Tuesday the tomb of Hussein al-Majid, father of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, was also bombed in the northern town of Tikrit.