Two overnight bomb blasts outside a shopping mall in central Baghdad killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 30, security and medical officials said on Saturday.
The blasts were the latest in a series of deadly attacks at Baghdad shopping centers this year, including one that killed more than 300 people in early July.
In the latest attack, one explosion came from a parked car and the other was caused by an explosives-laden vehicle driven by a suicide bomber outside Nakheel Mall on Palestine Street in the city centre, a police colonel said.
The blasts, which hit just before midnight (2100 GMT) Friday, shattered windows at the multi-storey mall and damaged a fence surrounding it.
ISIL Takfiri group issued an online statement on the attack, saying it was carried out by two Iraqi suicide bombers, one of whom wore an explosive belt and another who drove an explosives-rigged vehicle.
On Tuesday, a car bomb near a hospital killed at least seven people in Baghdad’s Karrada district — an area still reeling from a July suicide bombing that set nearby shopping centers ablaze and left more than 300 people dead.
ISIL claimed the Karrada blasts, as well as an attack involving gunmen and a car bomb that killed at least 12 people near another Baghdad mall in January.
Source: AFP
