KARBALA, Iraq, March 3, (Agencies): A suicide bomber struck in an area between major shrines in the Iraqi Shiite 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 Muhammad (PBUH) are among the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, and they are visited by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from Iraq and abroad each year. Sunni militants frequently target Iraq’s Shiite majority in a bid to increase sectarian tension and undermine the country’s Shiite-led government.
Meanwhile, three separate attacks in Shiite-dominated areas on Sunday in central Iraq have killed at least four people and wounded 14, officials said.
The deadliest was in the Husseiniya area northeast of Baghdad, where three roadside bombs went off simultaneously, killing three civilians, a police officer said. He said 11 others, including three policemen, were wounded.
Another police officer said a soldier was killed when a bomb attached to his car exploded in the northern Utaifiya neighborhood of Baghdad.
Two health officials confirmed the causality figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information to reporters.
Violence has ebbed across Iraq in recent years, but insurgents frequently attack security forces and civilians in an attempt to undermine the country’s Shiite-led government.