Suicide bomber hits Karbala
04 March, 2013
KARBALA: A suicide bomber struck in an area between major shrines in the Iraqi Shia holy city of Karbala on Sunday, wounding 10 people, security and medical officials said. Jamal al-Din Shahristani, an official at the Imam Hussein shrine, said an engineer working on a project between the site and the Imam Abbas shrine blew himself up, causing casualties. A police colonel and employee of a Karbala hospital put the toll from the bombing in the city south of Baghdad at 10 wounded. The shrines for the two grandsons of the Prophet Mohammed are among the holiest sites in Shia Islam, and they are visited by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from Iraq and abroad each year. Sunni militants frequently target Iraq's Shia majority in a bid to increase sectarian tension and undermine the country's Shiite-led government. No group claimed responsibility for the latest bombing but suicide attacks are a hallmark of al Qaeda's front group in Iraq. Iraq was wracked by bloody sectarian conflict following the 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, but tensions in the country have since decreased. End.
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