48 die in attack on Baghdad Shiite slum
(AP)
Updated: 2006-03-13 19:01

The feared resumption of mass sectarian violence erupted Sunday in a Baghdad Shiite slum when bombers blew apart two markets shortly before sundown, killing at least 48 people and wounding more than 200.

The bloody assaults on Sadr City came only minutes after Iraqi political leaders said the new parliament will convene Thursday, three days earlier than planned, as the U.S. ambassador pushed to break a stalemate over naming a unity government.

The attackers struck with car bombs, including a suicide driver, and mortars at the peak shopping time, destroying dozens of market stalls and vehicles as the explosives ripped through the poor neighborhood as residents were buying food for their evening meals.

The neighborhood was quickly sealed off by Mahdi Army militiamen of radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr amid pandemonium as residents searched wildly for survivors and put charred corpses into ambulances and trucks to be taken away.

Smoke billowed into the evening sky and angry young men kicked the decapitated head of the suicide attacker, who appeared to be an African, that lay in the street at a shop door, according to AP Television News video.

The nature of the attack, its use of a suicide bomber, bore the hallmarks of al-Qaida in Iraq, which has said it hoped to start a Shiite-Sunni civil conflict.

Police said they defused a third car bomb, likely preventing an even higher death toll.