Female suicide bombers leave 50 dead, 250 injured on day of carnage in Iraq

Three female suicide bombers killed 28 people and wounded 92 when they blew themselves up among Shi'ites walking through the streets of Baghdad on a religious pilgrimage on Monday, Iraqi police said.

And in the northern oil city of Kirkuk a suicide bomber killed 22 people and wounded 150 at a protest against a disputed local elections law, Iraqi health and security officials said.

One security official said the bomber may also have been a woman.

Survivor: A man injured in a bomb attack is transported into a hospital in Baghdad

The attacks mark one of the bloodiest days in Iraq in months and underscored the fragility of recent security gains in the country, where violence is at its lowest level since early 2004.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the Baghdad blasts but Sunni Islamist al Qaeda often targets Shi'ite pilgrims. It considers Shi'ism -- the majority Muslim denomination in Iraq -- heretical.

At least 1 million people are expected to take part in the pilgrimage in the Iraqi capital, which peaks on Tuesday and marks the death of one of Shi'ite Islam's 12 imams, one of the most important events in the Shi'ite religious calendar.

"These blasts that happened today will increase our determination to finalise this ceremony ... and defeat terrorism," pilgrim Taher Abd-Noor said.

Al Qaeda has increasingly used women to carry out suicide attacks because they can often evade the more stringent security checks applied to men. Women have carried out some 20 suicide attacks in Iraq this year, the U.S. military has said.

The apparently coordinated blasts in Baghdad shattered a period of relative calm in the city and took place despite heavy security for the annual pilgrimage to the Kadhamiya shrine.

U.S. commanders caution that despite better security, suicide bombers wearing vests packed with explosives will still periodically manage to slip into crowded places.

The U.S. military put the Baghdad death toll at 20, but did not specify if the suicide bombers were women. It said 16 people had been killed in Kirkuk.

To hospital: A woman injured in a bomb blast is wheeled into a hospital in Kirkuk

Reuters television pictures showed police, firemen and other workers washing blood and clearing debris from the street at the scene of one of the blasts in Baghdad.

A Reuters witness saw workers collecting pieces of flesh and body parts.

Police on Sunday also said gunmen killed seven pilgrims in southern Baghdad as they made their way to the shrine, but some officials on Monday said they were unaware of the incident.

In Kirkuk, Kurdish television footage showed thousands of people demonstrating against Iraq's provincial elections law when an explosion prompted a rush for cover.

A Reuters witness said there was a stampede as police fired into the air.

A security official who declined to be named said witnesses saw a female suicide bomber carry out the attack and that the body parts of a woman had been found, distinct from other victims of the blast because it was completely dismembered.

Tensions have been high in oil-rich Kirkuk before provincial polls expected to be held late this year or early 2009.

Mosques called for people to give blood. Reuters television footage showed Kirkuk's main hospital packed with wounded, some lying on a floor slick with blood because of a lack of beds.

Demonstrators seeking refuge after the blast ran to a nearby office of Kirkuk's ethnic Turkmen minority, but were fired upon by the building's guards, who thought they were under attack, said Major-General Jamal Taher, Kirkuk's police chief.

The protesters then burned cars and set fire to the building, but the situation was brought under control, he added.

Kurds in the ethnically mixed city say it should belong to the largely autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, but Arabs and ethnic Turkmen want it to stay under central government authority.

Last week, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani rejected the provincial election law as unconstitutional after Kurdish lawmakers boycotted the parliament session that passed it. That has forced lawmakers to try to reach a compromise.

Kurdish and Arab politicians seized on the Kirkuk blast to highlight their political aims regarding the elections law.

The law would have postponed polls in Kirkuk and allocated equal seats to ethnic or sectarian groups, which Kurds reject.

A curfew had been imposed on Kirkuk until Tuesday morning.

Al Qaeda has exploited ethnic faultlines in Iraq's north, where it has sought to regroup after being forced from its former strongholds in Baghdad and Iraq's West.  (Writing by Mohammed Abbas; Editing by Samia Nakhoul)