Blasts kill 143 pilgrims in Iraq

BAGHDAD — Simultaneous terrorist attacks killed at least 143 Muslim pilgrims and wounded hundreds yesterday as they marked a sacred Shi’ite religious holiday for the first time in decades. Unofficial death tolls ranged at more than 200.

U.S. officials blamed the mayhem, described as Iraq’s bloodiest day since the end of the war, on an operative of terror network al Qaeda who recently drafted a letter proposing to try to start a civil war between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims.

Explosions in the holy city of Karbala, about 75 miles south of the capital, Baghdad, tore through a procession of more than 1 million at the close of the 10-day festival of Ashura, the most holy day on the Shi’ite calendar. It commemorates the 7th-century martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of Prophet Muhammad.

Moments later in Baghdad, multiple suicide bombers attacked pilgrims commemorating the holiday at the city’s main Shi’ite mosque.

Iraqi officials declared a three-day period of mourning and suggested that a ceremony today to sign an interim constitution would be delayed.

In both cities, panicked pilgrims fled the explosions in terror, sometimes running head-on into another blast.

A woman, her face bloodied beneath a black veil, held her husband as a child lay nearby.

A giant green flag carried in celebration became a makeshift stretcher stained with the blood and charred skin of a victim being pulled to safety.

The terror quickly turned to rage, with crowds at Baghdad’s Kazimiya mosque attacking American soldiers who arrived shortly after the blasts, leaving two with broken bones.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Hussein al-Sistani, Iraq’s most powerful Shi’ite cleric, condemned the attacks in a message on his Web site but also criticized coalition forces for being slow in controlling the country’s borders against infiltrators and equipping Iraqi security forces.

Coalition spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said the chief suspect in the attacks was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian with links to al Qaeda.

Coalition officials recently released a captured letter, thought to have been written by the suspect, claiming responsibility for past suicide bombings and proposing a wave of attacks on Shi’ites to destabilize Iraq.

“The terrorists want sectarian violence because they believe that is the only way they can stop Iraq’s march toward the democracy that the terrorists fear,” said L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq. “They will lose because the Iraqi people want and will have democracy, freedom and a sovereign Iraqi government.”

Gen. Kimmitt said three suicide bombs had exploded at the Kazimiya mosque and that a fourth attacker had been detained when his bomb failed to go off.

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