TWO roadside bombs killed 30 people outside a mosque in the Iraqi city of Baquba just as Sunni Muslim worshippers were leaving Friday prayers.
The civil war in neighbouring Syria has strained relations between Islam's two main denominations across the region, contributing to a resurgence of sectarian violence in Iraq.
A further 25 people were wounded in the Baquba explosions, which occurred around ten minutes apart in the ethnically-mixed city 40 miles north-east of the capital Baghdad.
The second explosion tore through a crowd of people who had rushed to help those hurt in the first blast.
Speaking from his hospital bed, teacher Khalid Jameel, 25, said: "We were evacuating the wounded after the first roadside bomb exploded inside a dustbin.
"Ten minutes later another bomb exploded about six metres away from the first and I got some shrapnel in my stomach."
It was not immediately clear who carried out the bomb attack.
Separately, a car bomb killed three Shi'ite Muslim pilgrims from Iran in the city of Samarra, where the bombing of a shrine in 2006 sparked off the worst sectarian carnage to engulf Iraq after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
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