Baghdad, April 23: A series of five car bombs, three during prayers at Shiite mosques in Baghdad, and other attacks across Iraq killed 58 people on Friday.
Two car bombs in the impoverished district of Sadr City, one close to a political office of Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr and another at a market in the area killed 39 people and wounded 45, a security official said.
A third car bomb that exploded outside a Shiite mosque in Al-Ameen district in the east of the capital killed eight people and wounded 13, he said.
Earlier, at Abdel Hadi al-Chalabi mosque, named after the father of former deputy prime minister Ahmed Chalabi, a car bomb killed five people and wounded 14, he added.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks in Baghdad.
The attacks in the capital followed early morning violence in Al-Anbar, a Sunni Arab province west of Baghdad, where an anti-terror judge’s home was targeted in a sequence of explosions that killed six people.
The judge escaped unharmed but two of his sons were wounded.
The conflict-wracked country held parliamentary elections on March 7, the second such vote since the US-led invasion in 2003. Maliki narrowly lost to his main challenger, former premier Iyad Allawi.
Allawi won 91 seats to Maliki’s 89 but neither came close to the 163 seats needed to form a government on their own, ushering in weeks of as yet fruitless negotiations to put together a ruling coalition in a 325-seat parliament.
—Agencies