A suicide bomber killed 22 people south of Baghdad yesterday by offering poor Shi?ite workers day labouring jobs and then detonating explosives packed inside his minibus as the crowd gathered around it. In the capital itself, three near-simultaneous explosions, at least two of them car bombs, killed at least six people and wounded 30 at a bus station in mainly Shi?ite east Baghdad.

A spokesman for police in the mainly Shi?ite city of Hilla, 100 km south of the capital, said 49 people were wounded in the early morning blast there, when shrapnel tore through the expectant crowd as labourers jostled to come closer.

The tactic has been used before by al Qaeda-linked Sunni militants at spots where men congregate in the hope of casual work. Hilla is often a target for attacks, including the bloodiest single bombing since the US invasion, in which a suicide car bomber killed 125 people in February 2005.

?I was standing with other labourers when the minibus came and the driver asked for labourers. Everybody ran towards him and then he detonated his vehicle,? Ali Mohammed told Reuters as he lay in a local hospital, his left thigh bandaged. His life was probably saved by the fact that he was slow in reaching the vehicle and was standing at the back of the crowd when the bomb exploded.

?I saw the fire and collapsed on the ground,? he said. There were few details of the coordinated blasts at the Mashtel bus garage in Baghdad but an Interior Ministry source said the death toll could rise above the six first reported.

In Hilla, many of the wounded were standing well away from the explosion. ?We are poor people. We?ve done nothing wrong,? Saja Kadhem, who owns a shop near the blast site, said as doctors bandaged a shrapnel wound to his head. ?I saw the labourers crowding around and then the vehicle blew up.?

The blast came against a backdrop of continuing bloodshed between majority Shi?ites and minority Sunnis that has killed thousands of Iraqis and raised fears that the country is teetering on the edge of all-out civil war. Hilla, close to the site of ancient Babylon, is surrounded by Sunni rural areas that are havens for insurgents and al Qaeda suicide bombers. In August, a bomb apparently left on a parked bicycle hit a crowd of young Iraqi men outside an army recruiting office killing 12 people.

Yesterday?s blast followed the killing of a prominent Shi?ite Islamist politician on Saturday in what looked like a sectarian assassination. Ali al-Adhadh of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) was shot dead with his wife as he drove in mainly Sunni west Baghdad.

Enraged by a warrant of arrest

Minority Sunni Arabs were enraged last week after a warrant of arrest was issued for leading Iraqi Sunni cleric Harith al- Dari on charges of inciting terrorism, accusing the Shi?ite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of sectarianism.

Maliki?s six-month-old national unity government has struggled to curb the rampant sectarian violence gripping Iraq but is coming under growing US pressure to show some progress in reaching a political accommodation with Sunnis and reining in militias blamed for much of the bloodshed.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appealed to Iraqis not to let the sectarianism destroy their country. Rice said during a visit to Vietnam on Saturday that Iraqis ?have one future and that is a future together. They don?t have a future if they try to stay apart?.