Iraq:

Car Bomb at Funeral in Iraq Kills at Least 7 and Hurts Scores

By TIM ARANGO and DURAID ADNAN

Published: September 30, 2011

BAGHDAD — A large car bomb exploded Friday evening at a funeral in the southern Shiite town of Hilla, leaving several people dead and more than 60 wounded. It was a deadly reminder that even as American forces prepare to withdraw and officials claim success in stabilizing Iraq, random attacks and assassinations are still daily occurrences.

On Friday, Iraq’s latest scene of carnage was outside a Shiite mosque, near a holy shrine for the Prophet Ayub. Several high-level local officials were in attendance, including the leaders of the local court and provincial council. Both officials had just left before a vehicle, which had been parked outside the mosque, exploded. But the son of the local judge, who led the appeals court in the area, was killed.

There were conflicting reports about casualties. Local police and hospital officials said seven people were killed and 63 were wounded. Other news reports said 17 or 18 people had been killed.

“We have received a large number of the wounded, and most of them are burned,” said Ahmed Ejrish, a hospital official in Hilla, which is about 60 miles south of Baghdad. “It’s the first time I’ve seen this kind of bombing.”

There appears to have been a recent increase in attacks against Shiites, evoking for some the worst days of Iraq’s sectarian warfare in 2006 and 2007, when Sunnis and Shiites killed each other daily. The recent high-profile attacks on Shiites include the gruesomekillings of 22 Shiite pilgrims in the desert of Anbar Province, a largely Sunni region, after they were dragged off a bus bound for Syria on Sept. 12. Last Sunday, several explosions struck outside a government office in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing more than a dozen people.

After the bus attack, officials from both Anbar and Karbala — where the pilgrims had been traveling from — met to defuse sectarian tensions, and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki publicly played down the sectarian nature of the episode. Many believe that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia or other Sunni insurgent groups are trying to prompt a return to the violence of Iraq’s worst days, but there is little sign that Shiites, who are a majority here and are firmly in control of the state’s levers of power, are willing to head down that dark path again.

A local security official complained that there were not enough security personnel at the funeral, given the local dignitaries in attendance. “There were many officials who visited the funeral, and we didn’t keep track of which cars belonged to whom,” said the official, who gave his name only as Abu Hussain because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

The leader of the provincial council, Khadum Majed, who attended the funeral, said local officials had received intelligence that a vehicle bomb was inside the province. “But the information that we had was not enough,” Mr. Majed said. “We didn’t have the type of car or the plate number. We have weak intelligence.”

He said that despite a checkpoint outside the site of the funeral and a large contingent of personal bodyguards, “we were able to do nothing.”

Mr. Majed said: “It doesn’t matter who was the target. The problem is that we lost a lot of people and many were wounded.”

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An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Hilla, Iraq.A version of this article appeared in print on October 1, 2011, on page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Car Bomb at Funeral in Iraq Kills at Least 7 and Hurts Scores.