by Ammar Karim
BAGHDAD, Sept 14 (AFP) - Volunteers scoured a Baghdad football stadium for remains of victims Tuesday after a massive car bombing killed at least 47 people dead in the bloodiest attack in the capital since July.
A vehicle packed with high explosive detonated outside Baghdad's main police station in the restive Haifa Street district as dozens of hopeful young police queued to apply for a job.
It was the bloodiest attack yet in the neighbourhood, a bastion of Saddam Hussein loyalism that has become a byword for death and destruction, with clashes between insurgents and US troops almost daily.
Policeman Ali Badri said some recruits had been admitted to the adjacent Zawra sports club for a training exercise at around 7:30 am (0330 GMT) but were sent away after two mortar rounds landed inside.
"Instead of going away, the recruits gathered in a nearby coffee shop hoping they would get another chance today," he said.
Two hours later, shrapnel had gutted the crowded coffeeshop. A neighbouring cafeteria and computer games shop were similarly devastated.
Personal effects -- glasses and watches, together with crumpled Iraqi dinar notes stained with blood -- lay amid the tortured debris.
The stench of burnt flesh engulfed the air.
Outside one smashed shop was a pool table where children, still on summer holiday in Baghdad, often played billiards.
At least eight civilian cars were incinerated in the blast. One was flung across the road into a school playground.
In the stadium, on rooftops and trees, dozens of police and volunteers gathered up body parts that had been scattered by the force of the explosion.
One man collected up a handful of charred pigeons.
"I saw a headless woman's body just 20 metres (yards) away from the car bomb," said Emad Abbas Khalaf, 28, who helped emergency crews evacuate the wounded.
Anguished relatives, desperate for news of loved ones, frantically turned over ID cards or inspected dozens of pairs of shoes police had lined up on the roadside near the crater gouged in the ground by the blast.
A dazed woman, Zahra Mohammed, who lost her son on April 11, 2003, two days after Baghdad fell to US-led troops, said she went to deadly explosion after deadly explosion in the vain belief she might find her son's body.
"Since the downfall of the former regime, whenever I hear an explosion, I rush to the scene to look for my son," the 58-year-old said.
Ambulances screeched through the streets, ferrying not only the wounded but also blood donors to local hospitals.
Angry men cursed US troops and insurgents alike as tears poured down the faces of shocked residents.
"Everything that happens in Iraq happens because of terrorists and because of America," said Ahmed Hadi, 26.