BAGHDAD: Shopkeepers and homeowners in Baghdad cleared rubble and looked for bodies on Friday, a day after a series of explosions killed nearly 70 people and devastated homes and a bazaar just before nightfall. Four times as many were wounded in blasts that police blamed on a spray of rockets across mainly Shiite east Baghdad, but which army generals said were caused by large bombs planted in buildings. The attack may have involved a combination of these. State television, which said the toll had risen to more than 67 dead and 300 wounded, called it a rocket attack but then interviewed an Iraqi army spokesman who repeated the alternative version that militants had planted explosives in buildings. “Terrorists planted explosives inside the buildings,” Brigadier General Kassem al-Moussawi told Iraqi television, echoing a fellow general and explosives expert who said within four hours of the blasts that they went off in apartments and shops rented recently by militants who rigged them with bombs. With little sign of forensic investigators at the blast sites, it was not clear how this conclusion was reached so soon.
Hours after the first blasts, which police said were from seven Katyusha rockets, residents heard more mortar rounds go off, part of a confusing and deadly evening in Baghdad, where US and Iraqi troops began a big security crackdown last month. Four policemen were killed in two attacks on Friday. Many deaths came as families gathered for the start of the Muslim weekend.