The death toll from bombing attacks in central Baghdad thoroughfare on Thursday evening mounted to 68 killed and 120 others injured, an Interior Ministry source said on Friday.
"Our latest reports about casualties in yesterday's double bombing in the Attar commercial street in Karrada said that the death toll is 68 and 120 injured," the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
On Thursday, around 7:00 p.m. local time (1700 GMT), a roadside bomb ripped through a busy thoroughfare in the Shiite neighborhood of Karrada in central the capital. When the security troops and civilians were gathering on the scene, a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest blew himself up among the crowd, the police said.
Earlier, a police source put the toll at 54 killed and 123injured, including four women and seven children.
Insurgents have used such tactic in their attacks repeatedly, drawing in as more people as possible with the first blast, especially security and medic workers, before blowing up a second bomb, causing as much casualty as they can, the ministry source said.
On Friday morning, another suicide car bomb attack occurred in the northern city of Mosul when a suicide bomber rammed hisexplosive-laden car into the Waqqass police station in central the city and blew it up, Brigadier Khalid Abdul Sattar, spokesman ofNineveh's police operations office told Xinhua.
The powerful blast killed four policemen and wounded 17 people, including ten policemen, along with destroying parts of the police station’s building and several nearby houses and shops, Sattar said.
Since last summer, the security in Iraq has improved, thanks to the surge of U.S. troops, the Sunnis' uprising against al-Qaidaand the ceasefire of a major Shiite militia.
The U.S. military, however, warns al-Qaida remains the leading threat to the security.
Iraqi official statistics showed that civilian deaths grew by more than 30 percent in February compared with January due to a string of large-scale suicide bombings.
The growing casualties came as the U.S. is debating whether to pull out more troops from Iraq after the first phase of withdrawal would have completed this summer. The U.S. military officers here want to suspend a further withdrawal so as to assess the security situation.
Source:Xinhua
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