borne bombs rocked Baghdad Tuesday, killing 127 people, including women and students, and wounding hundreds in the third co-ordinated massacre to devastate the city since August. Bombs left pools of blood, charred buses and scattered body parts in a brutal reminder of the threat from Iraq's stubborn insurgency. The blasts, most detonated by suicide bombers, ripped through crowded areas close to government buildings, which should have been under tight security after previous devastating attacks in the capital in recent months. The bombings undermine Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki's claims to have brought security to the country before a national election now scheduled for March 6, and could rattle foreign oil chiefs due in Iraq this weekend for a major contract auction. “We had entered a shop seconds before the blast, the ceiling caved in on us, and we lost consciousness. Then I heard screams and sirens all around,” said Mohammed Abdul Ridha, one of the 448 wounded in the series of blasts. Smoke billowed and sirens wailed as emergency workers removed the dead in black body bags. Pools of blood had formed next to burnt-out minibuses, police vehicles and dozens of crumpled cars at one bomb site, the blast leaving a huge crater. “What these gangs are doing are criminal acts which express their bankruptcy and disappointment ... after what the Iraqi people and its political powers have achieved,” Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi said in a statement. In one attack, a suicide bomber blew up his vehicle in the car park of a courthouse, after getting through a checkpoint, police said. Another blast, this time a parked car bomb and not a suicide bomber, struck a temporary building used by the Finance Ministry after its main premises were devastated in the August bombing. A third bomber blew himself and his car up near a training center for judges.
