A suicide bomber blew himself up at a Kurdish funeral in Iraq's volatile, ethnically mixed northern Diyala province on Monday, killing 25 people and wounding 45, police said.
The bombing took place in the town of Jalawla, 115 km northeast of Baghdad. Diyala is a melting pot of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen variously professing Sunni, Shia, Christian and other faiths.
Jalawla lies on the disputed border between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq and was one of several towns that saw tense standoffs between Iraqi central government forces and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters last year.
Tensions between Arabs and Kurds in Diyala province have been rising, driven by disputes over oil and territory between Iraq's Shia Arab-led government in Baghdad and officials in the largely autonomous Kurdistan region.
Earlier, a bomb at a west Baghdad bus terminal killed nine people and wounded 23, Iraqi police said, the second bomb attack in the predominantly Sunni Arab Abu Ghraib district this month.
A source in Abu Ghraib hospital said they had received eight bodies from the blast and treated nine people for wounds so far.
Violence has dropped sharply in Iraq in the last year to lows rarely seen since mid-2003, but militants, mostly linked to Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda, have shown themselves still capable of launching devastating bomb attacks.
On March 10th, a suicide bomber killed at least 28 people in Abu Ghraib. The bomb targeted tribal leaders and security officials who had gathered for a reconciliation conference.
Reuters