Many killed in fresh round of Iraq attacks

ZUBAIDIYAH, Iraq: A car bomb blamed on Al-Qaeda at a market in central Iraq killed eight people yesterday and three others were murdered in Baghdad.
The violence came a day after a series of attacks across Iraq, the bloodiest of which was also blamed on Al-Qaeda’s front group in Iraq, killed 44 on Friday. In yesterday’s attack, a car bombing in the town of Zubaidiyah at 9:15 a.m. killed eight people and wounded 37 others, a security official and a medic at a hospital in nearby Aziziyah said.
The medical official said a child was among the dead, and women and children were among the wounded. “This explosion bears the fingerprints of Al-Qaeda, and the followers of Saddam,” provincial governor Mehdi Hussein Al-Zubaidi told AFP, referring to now-executed ruler Saddam Hussein.
Zubaidi’s remarks echoed those of the governor of Diwaniyah province a day earlier, after it suffered a massive truck bomb that left 26 dead.
About a dozen shops were badly damaged by the Zubaidiyah bombing, an AFP correspondent at the scene said, adding that security officials imposed a vehicle curfew on the town in the aftermath of the attack.
“It was a huge explosion this morning,” said Hussein Al-Zubaidi, who owns a grocery store in the market where the bombing took place. “It was strange for us — it is the first time this has happened in our town. We have only one ambulance, so people worked together to evacuate the victims.”