Dozens of Shia worshippers marking the festival of Ashura have been killed in a double bombing and a gun attack in Iraq.
 
Thirteen people died, including three women and a teenage boy, and 39 were wounded when a bomb hidden in a rubbish bin exploded amid a procession of Shias in the town of Khanaqinn northeast of Baghdad, police said.
 
A suicide bomber also blew himself up among 150 worshippers outside a Shia mosque in the town of Balad Ruz, in Diyala province, killing 23 people and wounding 57, police said.
 
Armed men shot dead four Ashura pilgrims and wounded six in a minibus heading to a mosque in Baghdad's Bayaa district.
Soldiers deployed
 
Ashura ceremonies have been a target in the past.

Suicide bombings and other attacks on Ashura crowds in Karbala and Baghdad in March 2004 killed 171 people.

Iraqi authorities had deployed 11,000 police and soldiers in the city of Karbala, the focus of the Ashura commemoration that marks the death in battle of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Mohammad's grandson, 1,300 years ago.

His death in AD 680 entrenched the schism between Shia and Sunni Muslims, a split that now continues to divide Iraq.

Tens of thousands have also died in sectarian violence since an attack on a Shia mosque in Samarra in February 2006.

Photo caption

A man wounded in a bomb attack in Khanaqinn, Iraq