A suicide car bomber killed at least 40 people and wounded 128 at a crowded bus station near a major Shi'ite shrine in the Iraqi holy city of Kerbala today.
While in Baghdad, police said a suicide car bomber detonated his device before a checkpoint at the southern Jadriyah bridge, killing 10 people, wounding 15 and burning several cars in the second major attack on a bridge in the capital in the past two days.
Television footage showed the twisted, blackened wreck of what was thought to have been the car used to deliver the bomb as ambulance and rescue services worked to save the wounded.
Charred corpses were piled in the back of an ambulance, while a pair of sneakers lay next to the badly burned body of another victim on the bridge.
Earlier this week, a truck bomb killed seven people on Sarafiya bridge in northern Baghdad on Thursday, destroying most of the steel structure.
Meanwhile, a police source put the death toll in Kerbala, 70 miles southwest of Baghdad, at 65. But Khaled al-Rubaie, media director of al-Husseini hospital in Kerbala, said 41 people had been killed and 128 wounded, many of them women and children.
The attack occurred near a crowded market and some 200 metres from the Imam Hussein shrine, where the grandson of Islam's Prophet Mohammad is buried - one of the most important sites for Shi'ites.
The violence came a day after leaders from across Iraq's sectarian divide pleaded for unity as they gathered under high security at a special session of parliament to condemn a suicide bombing that tore through the building on Thursday.
US and Iraqi officials have launched a crackdown in Baghdad aimed at creating averting a deepening of the sectarian violence between majority Shi'ites and once dominant minority Sunni Arabs.
The operation has succeeded in reducing the number of targeted killings, but US and Iraqi commanders have found car and suicide bombers much harder to stop.