March 3, 2004
By TAREK AL-ISSAWI and JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writers

KARBALA, Iraq - Grieving relatives collected the bodies of the dead from overwhelmed hospitals Wednesday after devastating suicide bombings against Shiite Muslim pilgrims, and officials said Iraqi police and U.S. troops detained 15 people, some possibly Iranians, in the attacks.

Also Wednesday, three rockets hit a telephone exchange building in Baghdad, knocking out international phone service for much of the country only days after the system was put back in service. One Iraqi worker was killed and another injured, Iraqi officials said.

There were contradictory death tolls from Tuesday's near simultaneous bombings at Baghdad's Kazimiya shrine and holy sites in Karbala, 50 miles to the south.

U.S. administrators' death count was lowered from 143 to 117, a senior coalition official said Wednesday. Iraq's Health Ministry said 185 people died. Estimates of the wounded ranged from 300 to more than 400.

As authorities slowly identified the dead, relatives picked up their slain loved ones from Karbala's al-Hussein hospital Wednesday morning. Others wept as they scanned handwritten lists of names posted on the hospital walls. Iranian pilgrims, speaking in Farsi, struggled to communicate with the Iraqi hospital officials.

Some carried their relatives' bodies through the city's two main shrines, the tombs of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, for blessings, then took them to a nearby mosque to lay out before burial.

The confusion reflected the chaos of Tuesday's events, when the large blasts went off among thousands of pilgrims from Iraq and around the world marking the holiest day of the Shiite calendar, the mourning ceremony of Ashoura. Some of the explosions came from suicide attackers, others from explosives apparently brought in on wooden pushcarts.

U.S. and Iraqi officials pointed to an al-Qaida-linked Jordanian militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as a "prime suspect," saying he aims to spark a Shiite-Sunni civil war in Iraq.

It appeared other attacks had been planned. Iraqi officials said suicide bombers were arrested in Basra. In Kirkuk, where police found a bomb with 22 pounds of TNT alongside a road where Shiites had planned to march. The bomb was defused and the march canceled at police request, said Anwar Amin, the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps chief in Kirkuk.

In Najaf, police arrested two people carrying explosives near the Imam Ali shrine, police Col. Saeed al-Joubri said Wednesday.

A firm number of dead was difficult to reach — in part because some were taken to hospitals outside the city, said the hospital director Hassan Nasrallah.

Karbala health department director Salih al-Hasnawi said 98 were confirmed dead, but predicted that figure would likely rise because there were 12 bags of human remains. He also said a quarter of the 230 wounded were in severe condition.

Iraqi Health Minister Khudyar Abbas in Baghdad, however, put the Kazimiya death toll at 70 and the Karbala toll at 115 — a total of 185. But the U.S. official said 32 people were killed in Baghdad and 85 at Karbala, for a total of 117.

As casualties poured in after the blasts, Al-Hussein hospital — Karbala's only one — was "initially overwhelmed," Nasrullah said. "But supplies came in from around the country, as well as aid from Kuwait."

The coalition official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said 15 people were detained in Karbala after the blasts, nine of them in Iraqi custody. The others, held by coalition forces, included four Farsi speakers thought to be Iranians, the official said. An estimated 100,000 Iranians were believed to have come to Iraq for Ashoura.

Outside Kazimiya, the main Shiite holy site in Baghdad, mourners also searched through lists of the dead. Others carried the dead in wooden boxes, one draped with the flag of Iraq, another with the Islamic green flag of martyrdom.

The attacks forced the delay of a key milestone in the U.S. handover schedule — the planned Thursday signing of an interim constitution. Iraq's top U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said the signing would be delayed as the Governing Council declared a three-day mourning period.

Britain's envoy in Iraq, Jeremy Greenstock, predicted coalition troops would likely remain in Iraq at least two more years after the transfer of power this summer. Greenstock compared the Iraq mission to the Balkans, where a one-year operation launched in 1995 is still underway.

"But as in the Balkans we need to be around always for longer than we originally planned," Greenstock told the British Broadcasting Corp. "We've got a job to do and we're going to finish it."

U.S. and Iraqi officials, meanwhile, tried to get a clearer picture of how the well-organized, near-simultaneous attacks were carried out at Kazimiya and Karbala's Imam Hussein shrine.

The scene was horrific at the golden-domed shrines — torn bodies littered the streets amid pools of blood. Shaken witnesses had varying accounts of what happened.

Two or three suicide bombers detonated the explosives strapped to their bodies at Kazimiya, the coalition official said. Earlier reports that a fourth bomber was captured turned out to be incorrect, the official said.

In Karbala, there was apparently one suicide bomber and several sets of explosives brought to the site on wooden carts, frequently used to bring supplies to pilgrims or ferry the elderly between holy sites, the official said.

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