IRAQ: Three car bombs killed at least 43 people in a co-ordinated attack on a Baghdad bus station during yesterday's morning rush hour, ending a lull in insurgent attacks as Iraqi leaders resumed talks on a new constitution.
At least 43 people were killed and 88 wounded, an official in the interior ministry said. Police and medics were among the dead, struck by the third bomb, between the bus station and the nearby Kindi hospital as victims of the earlier blasts were being taken there.
One witness said a bus about to depart for Iraq's second city of Basra, had been incinerated by the blast and it appeared many passengers were killed.
The multiple explosions suggested an attack by one of the Islamist radical groups active in the Sunni Arab insurgency against the US-backed, Shi'ite-led government - though unlike many bombings by groups like al- Qaeda, several police sources said none of the cars was driven by a suicide attacker.
That would mean the attackers had laid an elaborate trap to place and time a car bomb to go off just at the point where rescue services were moving casualties toward medical aid.
It was the first attack of this scale in Baghdad for nearly a month and occurred hours before politicians were to resume efforts to resolve deadlock on a new constitution, following their failure to produce a draft by Monday's midnight deadline.
Parliament gave leaders of rival sectarian and ethnic groups a further week to settle their differences. Sectarian and ethnic divisions over the extent to which regions should have autonomy and control over oil and other resources remain at the heart of the dispute, negotiators said.
A Shi'ite parliamentarian close to the talks said a document was in circulation that the parties were studying. "The constitution will be done before the week ends," he said, adding Kurdish politicians had reservations about some points.
Saleh al-Mutlak, a negotiator from the Sunni minority that dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein, said his group still opposed provisions that might give Islamist Shi'ites control over the southern oilfields and allow Kurds to expand their region's boundaries to annexe the oil resources of the north.
Tensions are high between Arabs, Kurds and ethnic Turkmen in the northern oil capital of Kirkuk, where gunmen killed six Iraqi soldiers as they drove to work on Wednesday.
Yonadem Kanna, a Christian member of the drafting panel, said some Sunni Islamist parties were prepared to compromise on federalism, but he doubted that the secular nationalists headed by Mutlak would give ground.