Series of blasts kills nearly 100 in Iraq

BAGHDAD -- Suicide bombers killed nearly 100 people yesterday in one of the deadliest days of Iraq's insurgency, bringing houses down on sleeping families in Baghdad and blowing up Shi'ite Muslim worshipers in two mosques in the eastern part of the country just as the victims turned their faces up to the preachers to hear their Friday sermons.

''We had just said 'God is Great' -- and then I felt nothing but a massive explosion," Mohammed Kofiq Akram said by telephone from a hospital in Khanaqin, the northeastern town where most of the deaths occurred. Akram said shrapnel had struck his head and right shoulder.

At least 90 people were killed in the two mosques, according to Ibrahim Hassan Bajillan, head of the governing council for Diyala province. In both buildings, witnesses said, the explosions came just as worshipers were settling themselves on the floor to listen to their imams after finishing ritual prayers.

In Baghdad, there were no casualties in a hotel that Iraqi police and US soldiers said was the target of two successive bombings. But the explosions leveled the simple houses outside the hotel's blast walls, killing at least eight people.

In the aftermath of the Baghdad blasts, emergency workers scooped a wailing, bleeding girl of about 8 or 9 off a mound of rubble from a collapsed apartment building while twisted vehicles burned and firefighters clawed with their hands to reach trapped families. ''My son! My son!" one woman screamed, collapsing in the arms of a ring of women in black abayas. The boy had been crushed to death.

Nationwide, the attacks were the deadliest since Sept. 14, when at least 14 insurgent bombings in Baghdad killed more than 160 people. Al Qaeda in Iraq was believed to have been involved in at least the Baghdad blasts yesterday. The insurgent group said in a statement that the bombings represented retaliation for a US military offensive still underway in far western Iraq.

As in the September attacks, most of the victims yesterday were civilians.

Iraqi police and a US military officer said the blasts in the capital appeared to have targeted the Hamra Hotel, which houses some Westerners, including journalists. News organizations housed at the Hamra hotel include NBC News and The Boston Globe.

The tactics in the Hamra attack were similar to those employed in the Oct. 24 triple vehicle assault on the Palestine Hotel, where employees of the Associated Press, Fox News, and other organizations live and work.

In that attack, which killed 17 Iraqis, one vehicle blew a hole in a concrete blast wall, opening the way for a cement truck packed with explosives to penetrate the compound.

The truck detonated only a few feet into the compound after US troops raked the vehicle with automatic fire and the driver got stuck in debris. A third vehicle went off a short distance away.

Sa'ad al-Izzi, an Iraqi journalist with the Globe, said he awakened ''to a huge explosion which broke all the glass and displaced all the window and doors frames."

The same ruthless frequency of attacks that has dulled international attention to the carnage in Iraq has made Baghdad's emergency workers briskly efficient. Firefighters, sweating from exertion despite the coolness of the autumn morning, ferried oxygen and water to a man trapped under what had been the top floor of his home.

''Go! Go!" watching men exhorted.

The rescue fixated the neighborhood for more than an hour while other firefighters pulled one or two contorted, flopping corpses from nearby apartments.

When the survivor proved to be a Sudanese Arab -- a member of a group mistrusted by many in Iraq -- the neighbors watched silently. No one cheered as rescuers carried the man on a stretcher down the hill of broken masonry, his body almost miraculously spared injury and his head twisting as he craned to see the destruction.

''Take pictures! Take more pictures of our tragedy!" a woman standing in one of at least four small, destroyed apartment buildings cried out to photographers as a neighbor wiped blood from her face.

''Let Bush see them," said the woman, who identified herself as Um Ahmad. ''Let him be happy to see these pictures. Let him see what he did to us. We used to live in peace before he entered our country."

The dead in Baghdad included two women and two children, according to rescue crews.

The attackers apparently used a mix of high- and low-grade explosives and two vehicles to try to blow their way into the hotel compound, security officials said.

A security camera at the Hamra filmed the first vehicle, a white van or minibus, as it exploded outside concrete blast walls guarding the hotel.

The first blast appeared intended to blow down the blast walls so a second, larger vehicle bomb could enter the hotel complex, security officials said.

But debris and craters left by the first blast apparently blocked the second vehicle, which exploded among the apartment buildings outside.

A third vehicle bomb was discovered and detonated hours later.

The hotel bombings occurred less than a block from an Interior Ministry building where US troops this week found a secret prison housing scores of mostly Sunni Arab prisoners.

Yesterday's bombings in Khanaqin blew the roofs off both mosques, leaving them open to the sky. Survivors gave nearly identical descriptions of both blasts: The attackers lined up among the rows of men and detonated explosive belts strapped around their waists.

The number of dead was expected to rise when the search for bodies resumed at daylight, said Bajillan, the provincial official.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.