Baghdad: Six car bombs killed at least 46 people and wounded 204 others in Baghdad's largest Shiite neighborhood on Sunday, Baghdad emergency police said.
A seventh car bomb was found and defused in the same Sadr City neighborhood. At least some of the Baghdad blasts took place in markets.
In the aftermath of one market attack, burned victims could be seen being carried to ambulances and angry residents kicked the decapitated head of one man, apparently believing he was involved in the bombing.
Associated Press photos showed black smoke billowing from the neighborhood.
Reuters reported chaotic scenes at a Sadr City hospital where some victims were lying on the floor.
Sadr City is home to many poor Shiites and is often patrolled by militia members of the Mehdi Army.
Those men -- perhaps as many as 10,000 -- are loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the son of the late religious figure for whom the neighborhood is named.
An AP report said Mehdi Army members, armed with automatic rifles, sealed off the neighborhood after the blasts.
The attacks were part of the most deadly day in Iraq since February 28, when 55 people were killed in and around Baghdad about a week after a bomb heavily damaged a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra and set off sectarian violence.
In recent days the number of deaths had subsided, but US military officials had feared a large-scale attack designed to reignite sectarian strife and push Iraq into civil war.
The Iraqi Islamic Party, the major Sunni political organization in Iraq, issued a news release condemning Sunday's bombings.
"Each time that the political process efforts bringing different perspectives together, we are shocked by bloody incidents that are simply trying to collapse this process," the statement said.
The group accused the attackers of opposing a stable Iraq, and called on all political leaders to work to end the bloodshed.
Separately, two bombs detonated in the region of Baquba, north of Baghdad, killing two people.
Earlier Sunday, a roadside bomb went off as a US military patrol was passing through western Baghdad, killing six civilians and wounding 13 others, police said.
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The convoy was passing through the western Baghdad neighborhood of Qadisiya when the bomb went off.
On Saturday, two Iraqi intelligence officers were shot dead in western Baghdad, police said. Gunmen opened fire on the two intelligence officers in the Jihad neighborhood.
US tells employees not to fly out of Baghdad
After a security breach at Baghdad International Airport, the US government has prohibited commercial air travel for US government employees out of the Iraqi Capital.
On Saturday afternoon, a cigarette pack with suspicious material was found under the nose of an airplane, a senior official with Royal Jordanian Airlines said Sunday.
The senior official with Royal Jordanian, who insisted on anonymity, said that on Saturday, the airline's security personnel found a cigarette pack stuffed with powerful explosives and a detonator but no initiation device, so the device apparently was not capable of exploding on its own.
The cigarette pack was on the tarmac close to the luggage, under the nose of the plane that was scheduled to fly to Amman, the official said.
The pack was found as passengers were going through final screening to board the plane, according to a news release from the airline, which operates commercial flights out of Baghdad.
After the material was found, passengers and luggage were rechecked, and the flight took off after a two-hour delay, the official said.
Passengers on the flight included a delegation of 19 people from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, four from the Defense Ministry and nine judges from the Iraqi Bar Association, the official said.
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