BAGHDAD - At least 15 people were killed and more than 80 wounded as a car bomb exploded Thursday on a busy main road in an eastern sector of the Iraqi capital, hospital sources and police said.
Medics at Kindi hospital said they received the bodies of 12 dead, three of them women, along with 76 wounded, including 10 women, following the first blast in the Jadida district.
Another three dead and eight wounded, three of them women, were taken to Ibn-Anafees hospital.
An interior ministry official said the blast in a busy mixed neighbourhood was the work of a suicide bomber.
A second bomb, planted in a parked car, exploded three hours later in a western area of the city as a US military convoy was driving by, the interior ministry official said.
It was not immediately known if any US soldiers were hurt, but five Iraqi civilians in five cars were wounded in the attack in the Khadra district, the official added.
In the first explosion, at least eight cars and a bus were caught in the blast at 10:55 am (0655 GMT). Several storefronts were blown in and stalls operated by street vendors were sent flying.
Twisted bodies in ripped clothes were wheeled away in street peddlers' carts by residents as thick black smoke billowed into the sky.
Hysterical residents wailed and threw their arms up in the air as medics and police extracted charred bodies from the bus.
US forces who arrived at the scene after the blast fired rounds into the air to disperse the crowd while bystanders threw stones at them, witnesses said.
"There was no sign of a police presence or US patrols at the time of the explosion," said 32-year-old mechanic Anwar Ibrahim, who witnessed the blast but escaped unhurt.
Apartments had their windows blown in and roofs damaged.
Baghdad and other Iraqi cities have been hit by relentless car bomb and suicide attacks in recent days.
On Wednesday, 76 people died in a string of bomb attacks across the country, the largest of which killed 38 in the northern Sunni town of Tikrit.
05/12/2005 10:57 GMT