Three car bombs in Baghdad's Sadr City kill 16

Three near-simultaneous car bombs rocked crowded market places in eastern Baghdad's impoverished Sadr City district on Wednesday, killing at least 16 people and wounding 45, Iraqi officials said.

The blasts near three separate markets in the sprawling Shiite district came during late afternoon rush hour when workers and schoolchildren usually do their shopping before heading home, an interior ministry official said.

The bombings occurred within minutes of each other, suggesting they had been coordinated.

"The explosions started about 4:30 pm (1330 GMT) in three market places. Among the victims were women and children," said a Sadr City policeman.

Sadr City was once one of the Iraqi capital's most violent areas where Shiite death squads wrought bloodshed until a joint US and Iraqi military campaign last year brought relative peace to Baghdad's biggest slum.

Wednesday's carnage comes amid a wave of bloodletting, including a devastating attack last week by two women who blew themselves up in a crowded market near a revered shrine in the capital, killing at least 65 people.

The bombing at the Imam Musa al-Kadhim shrine in the historic and predominantly Shiite neighbourhood of Kadhimiyah in northern Baghdad came a day after a suicide attack killed dozens in a northern town.

The suicide bombing in a restaurant packed with Iranian religious pilgrims killed at least 56 in the town of Muqdadiyah, in the ethnically and religiously mixed Diyala province, which still sees regular attacks despite security improvements elsewhere in Iraq.

The surge in bloodshed comes two months before US troops are to withdraw from all major Iraqi towns and cities as part of a general drawdown required by a security pact signed with Washington in November.

US forces are to pull out of all Iraqi cities and major towns by June 30 and from the country as a whole by the end of 2011.

Violence has plummeted over the past two years as American and Iraqi forces have allied with former Sunni insurgents to help bring a fragile calm to vast area of the country.

However April is proving to be a deadly month, with nearly 300 people killed and more than 600 wounded, according to an AFP count based on reports from security officials.