[ADN Kronos] At least 25 people were killed in a double suicide attack on a Shia mosque in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Friday. Two suicide bombers are reported to have blown themselves up at the mosque in the district of Kadhimiya during Friday prayers.At least 60 people were injured in the latest bomb attack which occurred a day after nearly 80 people were killed and another 100 were injured in two separate suicide bombings in Baghdad and in Baquba.
While violence has fallen sharply in Iraq in the past year, a recent surge in suicide bombings is causing renewed concern.
On Friday a senior MP claimed that Iraqi intelligence had found a link between former members of the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein and recent bomb attacks.
Fryad Rawendozi, a member of the parliament's security and defence committee said that information gathered by Iraqi intelligence proved that Baathists played the role of Al-Qaeda in launching suicide attacks in Iraq (photo).
"Intelligence information showed that al-Baath organisations occupied Al-Qaeda's place in carrying out bombing attacks in Iraq," Rawendozi told the news agency, Voices of Iraq.
He claimed that several suicide bombers were Baathists.
In a separate development, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the purported leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, an Al-Qaeda-linked group, was captured in eastern Baghdad on Thursday.
A series of bomb explosions shook the Iraqi capital and some Iraqi provinces on 6 April to coincide with the anniversary of the establishment of the Baath party on 7 April 1947. The attacks left scores of casualties.
The Baath party was in power in Iraq from 1968 until 2003. At its height in the 1980s, the party had an estimated 1.5 million members as many joined in order to advance their careers under the former dictator's regime.
After the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, there was a bid to introduce a process of de-Baathification, but the United States more recently has tried to reverse the decision.
The Shias who now dominate Iraq's government have resisted the policy reversal, as they see it as just punishment for the mostly Sunni Baathists who ran the country as a police state for many years under Saddam's rule.