AFP - At least 30 people were killed and 28 wounded Saturday by a suicide bomber who detonated his explosive vest in a bus of Shiite pilgrims near Samarra north of Baghdad, security sources and medical.
A previous review of the sources had reported 27 dead.
"The bomber ran on board the bus stopped at a checkpoint a few kilometers from Samarra, and detonated his explosive vest inside the vehicle," said a police official.
"We received 30 bodies, including two women, and 28 wounded including two women," said an official at the General Hospital of the Sunni city of Samarra, 110 km north of Baghdad.
The pilgrims were returning from a ceremony of mourning for a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra and "the victims are all Iraqi.This is the bus passengers and bystanders, "said the driver of an ambulance.
The soldiers forbade journalists from approaching the site of the attack and the hospital.
Samarra which houses the mausoleum are buried the 10th and 11th imams revered by Shia Twelver Ali al-Hadi (827-868) and Hassan al-Askari (847-874) in which the faithful commemorate the death Saturday.
The destruction of the Samarra shrine bombing in February 2006 had triggered violence between Shiites and Sunnis in which tens of thousands of people had been killed.
Thursday, nine Shiite pilgrims were killed and 39 wounded by a bomb planted on a road north of Baghdad.
In January, six cars had exploded bombs in less than a week, leaving at least 57 dead and nearly 300 injured pilgrims who traveled to an annual ceremony of mourning and whipping in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, south Baghdad.
Attacks in recent weeks show that the sectarian conflict in Iraq still lingers within one year of departure of the last U.S. military contingent.
The Samarra bombing is the deadliest in Iraq since Jan. 27 when a car bomb has killed 48 during a funeral in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad.
The month of January was particularly bloody, with a total of 259 deaths (159 civilians, 55 policemen and 45 soldiers) according to official figures, the worst toll since 273 died in September 2010.
This upsurge of violence in contrast to the relative calm observed in November since the conclusion of an agreement to share power between different factions and the formation in December the government of Nouri al-Maliki.
Mr Maliki accused "terrorist apostates" in his vocabulary term for Al-Qaeda, which is violently anti-Shiite, of being the perpetrators of the attack Shiites.
Shiite pilgrimages have been repeatedly targeted by Sunni armed groups since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, caused by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
