BAGHDAD – A pair of simultaneous car bombs at a parking lot in Samawa city in southern Iraq killed at least 30 people and wounded another 55 on Sunday, an interior ministry official said. The attacks, in Iraq’s Shiite south come amid heightened tensions following the storming of the parliament in Baghdad on Saturday by thousands of supporters of powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The interior ministry said in an initial statement that 12 people were killed by explosives planted in two cars, but that many of the injured died en route or in hospital, raising the toll to 30 dead and 55 wounded. In Baghdad on Sunday, one person was killed and eight wounded by a planted bomb, amid tight security and tensions between protesters and security forces. “The security forces arrived at site and transferred the wounded to hospital,” the source added. Baghdad has been under tight security since Saturday, when thousands of protesters broke into the capital’s fortified Green Zone and stormed the parliament building. That happened after Sadr, whose supporters have been staging demonstrations for months, said he could “destroy” the government of Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi. Meanwhile, Abadi ended a meeting Sunday afternoon with President Fuad Masum and the parliament speaker, presumably to discuss the crisis, but there were no immediate reports about what they had discussed or decided.
