Baghdad Blasts Kill 62

Car bombs and a rocket barrage struck a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad late Sunday, killing at least 62 people, a municipal official said. The rockets were apparently fired from a mostly Sunni district targeted by U.S. troops in a crackdown against the sectarian violence roiling the capital.

About 140 were injured in the attack on the Zafraniyah neighborhood in southern Baghdad, which began about 7:15 p.m. with two car bombs and a barrage of an estimated nine rockets, Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Saddoun Abu al-Ula said.

He said the barrage heavily damaged three buildings, including a multistory apartment house that collapsed. Al-Ula said the rockets appeared to have been fired from the neighborhood of Dora, which has been the focus of thousands of U.S. troops sent to try to restore peace in Baghdad.

The head of a municipal council, Mohammed al-Rubaie, told Iraqi government television Monday that the death toll had risen to 62. He gave no precise number of injured but officials late Sunday put the figure at more than 140.

Several large explosions were heard in central Baghdad at sunrise Monday, but it was unclear where they came from.

The attack in Zafraniyah was the deadliest since the United States announced last month that it was reinforcing troop strength in the capital following a surge in sectarian violence that the United Nations estimated killed nearly 6,000 Iraqis in May and June.

The complex style of the assault was similar to a July 27 attack of mortars, rockets and car bombs on another mostly Shiite district, Karradah, which killed 31 people. Police said the rockets and mortars that struck Karradah also were fired from Dora.

A Sunni extremist group, the al-Sahaba Soldiers, claimed responsibility for the Karradah attack to punish Shiites for supporting the "crusaders," or Americans, and the "treacherous" Iraqi government.

Muhanna Yassin, who lives in Zafraniyah, said by telephone that the attack had left the neighborhood "a total mess" with "bodies of the dead and injured scattered around in the streets — old, young, women and children."

In other developments:

The U.S. military announced the capture of an insurgent leader who was responsible for an armed attack on a market last month that left more than 50 people dead. The insurgent was arrested Thursday during a cordon and search operation in Baghdad, a military statement said. It did not identify the insurgent, but described him as a "key terrorists cell leader." He "is directly linked" to the July 17 attack on a local market in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, the statement said.

Sunday, Health Minister Ali al-Shemari, a member of a Shiite group that operates a militia, said American soldiers arrested seven of his bodyguards in a pre-dawn raid on his office. "There was no legal warrant, there was no prior warning to the ministry, there was no reason to arrest them. It is a provocation," said al-Shemari, a member of the movement led by radical Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, head of the biggest Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb Saturday on a foot patrol south of Baghdad as nearly 40 violent deaths were reported in the country.

On Friday, U.S. soldiers arrested 60 Sunni men including members of an al Qaeda-affiliated cell that "specializes in bomb making" and carried out car bomb attacks in the capital, the U.S. command said.

Police found 12 bodies trapped in a grate in the Tigris River. All 12 men — aged between 35 and 45 years — had been bound, blindfolded and shot in the head or chest, police said. They appeared to have been the victims of sectarian death squads that operate in the religiously mixed communities in the Baghdad area.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki banned a Kurdish extremist party from operating in Baghdad in a move seen largely as a gesture to Turkey which had threatened to send troops across the border to destroy the group's bases in northern Iraq.