Police arrest 15 over shrine bombings
Iraqi police and US troops arrested 15 people, including several possible Iranians, in the devastating suicide attacks against Shiite pilgrims as authorities tried to discover how militants staged Iraq’s bloodiest attacks since the war ended.
There were contradictory death tolls from bombings at Shiite holy shrines in Baghdad and Karbala.
The American count of the dead was revised down, from 143 to 117, a senior coalition official said.
But Iraq’s Health Ministry said 185 people were killed, and some unofficial Iraqi death totals were as high as 230.
Estimates of the wounded ranged from 300 to more than 400.
The confusion reflected the chaos yesterday when suicide attackers set off their bombs and explosives apparently brought in on wooden pushcarts detonated among thousands of pilgrims gathered in the two cities for the holiest day of the Shiite calendar, the mourning ceremony of Ashoura.
The coalition official said 15 people were detained in Karbala after the blasts, nine of them in Iraqi custody.
The others, being held by coalition forces, included four Farsi speakers thought to be Iranians. An estimated 100,000 Iranians were believed to have come to Iraq for Ashoura, and many Iranians are present around the holy shrines throughout the year.
US officials and Iraqi leaders named an al-Qaida-linked Jordanian militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as a “prime suspect” for the attacks, saying he is seeking to spark a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq to wreck US plans to hand over power to the Iraqis on June 30.
Iraq’s US-appointed Governing Council pleaded with Iraqis to remain united - an attempt to avert reprisals.
In a sign of unity, Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish council representatives appeared before journalists hours after the attacks urging Iraqis to “maintain unity” to “cheat our enemies of the chance to inflict evil on the nation”.
The attacks forced the delay of a key milestone in the path toward the US handover of power to the Iraqis on June 30 – the planned Thursday signing of an interim constitution agreed to by council members this week.
Iraq’s top US administrator Paul Bremer said the signing would be delayed as the Governing Council declared a three-day mourning period.
Explosions rang out in Baghdad today, when three missiles hit a telephone exchange building.
Police said the missiles wounded one Iraqi and damaged the building in the capital’s Mansour neighbourhood.
