Linked Blasts Kill 31 in Baghdad

At least 31 people were killed early today in coordinated car bombings at a taxi and bus station and at the hospital where many of the victims were taken.

Sixty-five people were wounded, a Health Ministry official said. Nearly two dozen vehicles burned, including three buses.

The blasts shook jittery residents of the capital awake and ended a short period of relative calm here. U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police rushed to the scene.

“This is our destiny,” said Kadhem Karim, a manager of the bus station, consoling a group of people weeping amid the wreckage. “Just when it seems the car bombs and explosions are getting fewer, they start again.”

Two of the bombs exploded at eastern Baghdad’s busy Nahdha taxi and bus station, a hub for travel to or from Iraq’s Shiite south and Kurdish north.

Police said a third car bomb hit police cars and ambulances outside Al Kindi Hospital.

Witnesses described burning cars, clouds of smoke and scenes of panic and chaos as police tried to seal off the area.

The blasts came on the heels of the government’s failure to meet its original deadline for producing a draft constitution.

It was the deadliest strike in Iraq since July 29, when a suicide attack left 52 aspiring police recruits dead near the Syrian border, and the deadliest in Baghdad in at least a month.