Shia militia gunmen stormed through a Sunni Muslim district of western Baghdad today, shooting dead at least 42 people.
The killings sparked renewed fears of a full-scale civil war between the two groups and this evening two car bombs exploded outside a Shia mosque in the east of the Iraqi capital. Police said at least 15 people were dead and 17 injured.
A man comforts his mother who was hit by crossfire during shooting in the Jihad district of western Baghdad today
Earlier, the Interior Ministry said at least some of the victims of the shooting rampage in western Baghdad's Jihad district were shot by gunmen who pulled them from cars at fake police checkpoints close to a Shia mosque where a car bomb had killed three people on Saturday.
The violence was a blow to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's national reconciliation plan, which aims to end the bloodletting between his fellow Shias and the once-dominant Sunnis that has pitched Iraq toward all-out urban warfare in recent months.
President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, appealed for calm. The bloodshed followed days of apparently tit-for-tat attacks on Sunni and Shia mosques and operations by US- backed Iraqi troops to capture Shia militia warlords, seen as a growing threat to Mr Maliki's fledgling national unity coalition.
Police and Sunni politicians blamed rogue police commandos and the Mehdi Army militia of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr for today's Jihad killings, but officials from Sadr's movement, part of Mr Maliki's Shia Islamist bloc, denied any involvement.
Iraqi forces imposed a curfew in Jihad, officials said, warning that violators might be shot. Jihad and the rest of the Iraqi capital were mostly quiet but tense towards evening, though gunfire rattled across two other Sunni neighbourhoods.
Police and Interior Ministry sources said Shia gunmen earlier moved through Jihad district, checking people's identity papers for typically Sunni names.
One said Sunni men had been herded into side streets and gunned down. "Gunmen are killing Sunni civilians according to their identity cards," an Interior Ministry official said.
While bombings have often killed dozens, gunmen moving openly through neighbourhoods killing civilians is something seen only rarely in restive areas of mixed population outside Baghdad, and never on this scale in the capital.