BAGHDAD (AFP) - At least 45 people were killed, most of them children, and 200 others wounded in a string of car bombings in and around Baghdad, medics and the US military said.
Most of the casualties were children who had gathered to watch ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new water pumping station in a working class district in the southwest of Baghdad when two car bombs exploded.
Almost simultaneously, another car bomb went off near an Iraqi national guard checkpoint about one kilometer (half a mile) south of the water pumping station.
Vast clouds of black smoke billowed into the air above the site of the attacks, which were quickly closed off by the US military and Iraqi forces.
Health Minister Alaadin Sahab Adwan said the three bombing claimed lives of 42 people and wounded 200 others, while the morgue director at Yarmouk hospital said some 37 of the victims were children.
Earlier, one US soldier and two Iraqi policemen were killed in a car bombing west of Baghdad that also wounded 10 Iraqis and three US soldiers.
A witness who identified himself as Abu Sufian said he helped pull out the corpses of 32 children from the rubble.
He said the first car bomb was followed by the firing of an anti-tank missile just before the second exploded, adding that he saw a US military convoy passing by at the time of the blasts.
The Iraqi health ministry said 60 people were wounded from the first car bomb which occurred at 9:45 am (0545 GMT) between Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, site of the notorious US-run prison, to the west.