Bomb kills 20 in Baghdad, slain cleric mourned

BAGHDAD, Sunday (Reuters)

A suicide bomber killed up to 20 people at a police recruitment centre in Baghdad, while across town an angry crowd of Shi'ite Muslims mourned a senior cleric gunned down by insurgents.

Another bomb killed five and wounded 12 at a police checkpoint on a main highway just south of the city. After dark, two suicide bombers on foot struck a busy street in the centre of another town to the south, killing five people.

The bombings were the worst in Iraq in at least six days, shattering a relative lull in the Sunni Arab insurgency against U.S. forces and the Shi'ite- and Kurdish-led government.

A senior Interior Ministry source said 20 people had been killed by a bomber in an explosive vest who approached the ministry's special forces recruitment centre in the Mansour district of western Baghdad.

Twelve bodies lay under sheets surrounded by wailing relatives in a courtyard at the nearby Yarmuk hospital. A mother tore her black robes in anguished mourning as she ran to the body of her slain son.

Doctors there said they were also treating 21 wounded, many in serious condition. Others may have been treated elsewhere and some bodies may have been collected by families at the scene.

Suicide bombings and car bombs have become the deadliest tactic in violence which has worsened sharply since the elected government took office in April. Police recruits are frequent targets, yet many Iraqi men continue to sign up in the hope of a paying job in a country where work is scarce.

Al Qaeda's Iraq wing claimed responsibility.

In a Shi'ite neighbourhood of Baghdad, thousands of men held aloft the green-shrouded coffin of cleric Kamal al-Din al- Ghoureify, gunned down as he drove to prayers on Friday.

"It is a calamity for the neighbourhood, for Baghdad, for Muslims and for Shi'ites," Ghoureify's weeping brother Abu Hussein told Reuters. "What was his guilt? He was an old man, 70 years old and paralysed. What did he do?"

Ghoureify was a Baghdad representative for Ayatollah Ali al -Sistani, recognised as spiritual leader by much of Iraq's Shi'ite majority. Mourners packed the streets chanting and beating their chests, some brandishing AK-47 rifles, others holding portraits of the slain, turbaned cleric.

"All I want to say is that Sheikh Ghoureify and Dhari Ali al-Fayadh are martyrs, and martyrs live forever in God's eyes," Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari told a special meeting of his ruling Shi'ite political alliance. Fayadh, the oldest member of parliament, was assassinated by gunmen earlier this week.

A senior police officer in Mahmudiya, just south of the capital, said police and civilians were among five dead and 12 wounded when a suicide car bomber struck a police checkpoint on the highway. Doctors treating the wounded at a Baghdad hospital said the bomb was concealed in a vegetable cart.

Ghoureify's funeral cortege was passing through the area when the bomb went off, but was not struck.