A BOMBER rammed a car into a queue of would-be police recruits outside a clinic south of Baghdad yesterday, killing 125 people and injuring many more in the deadliest single attack since Saddam Hussein was ousted.

The assailant struck as young men applying to join the Iraqi police and the National Guard queued for medical tests, near the busy main market in al-Hillah. The blast, so powerful that it all but vaporised the suicide bomber’s car, tore through the queue and through crowds of people thronging the marketplace.

The scorched and bloodied street was littered with body parts, and the injured screamed for help from those left standing. Many of the dead and injured were women and children from the market.

As the injured were piled into trucks and rushed to hospital, others gathered the severed arms, feet and legs of the dead into blankets to carry away to the mortuary.

The carnage in the northernmost town of the Iraqi Shia South dealt another blow to hopes that the violence would tail off after January’s elections.

Angry and desperate crowds gathered outside the hospital, demanding to know what had happened to their relatives. Inside dazed survivors spoke of the chaos that followed the attack.

“I was lucky because I was the last person in line when the explosion took place. Suddenly there was panic and many frightened people stepped on me,” said Muhsin Hadi, 29, who had been hoping to join the National Guard. “I lost consciousness and the next thing I was aware of was being in the hospital.” He sustained a broken leg.

Health officials feared the death toll could rise as further casualties were discovered and some of the most badly wounded succumbed to their injuries.

“The martyrs may be more because there are many body parts still to be counted,” a hospital official said, as mortuary workers unloaded plastic body bags from trucks and weeping relatives looked on.

Al-Hillah, close to the ancient city of Babylon, is just south of the Triangle of Death, the mixed Sunni-Shia region south of Baghdad where there have been countless bomb attacks by insurgents.

Even before the fall of Saddam, its history was steeped in blood and tears as the site of a vast mass grave packed with the victims of Saddam’s repression of the 1991 Shia uprising.

Yesterday was the bloodiest single day in Iraq since the Shia holy festival of Ashura last March, when more than 170 people were killed in Karbala and Najaf.

The attack at al-Hillah was a brutal reminder of the continued potency of the insurgency, despite the recent government claims of progress in the battle against the insurgents. It came a day after Iraqi officials announced the capture of Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, half-brother of Saddam, who was believed to be financing the insurgency from Syria.

Iraqi officials told the Associated Press that he had been captured inside Syria by members of the Kurdish minority and had been handed over to Iraqi Kurds. It is assumed that they were acting with the consent of Damascus, which is eager to relieve growing pressure from the United States for harbouring insurgents. American military officials, however, concede there is unlikely to be a significant turning-point in the insurgency until Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant behind some of the bloodiest attacks, is caught.

Al-Hillah’s location makes it particularly vulnerable to attack by insurgents in the nearby Sunni areas seeking to aggravate tensions between the Shia majority and the Sunni minority, the tactic favoured by al-Zarqawi.

The bombing had the hallmarks of an al-Zarqawi attack, enormous in size and aimed at Shias and those willing to work for the security services. Western intelligence experts say that they believe other insurgent groups are beginning to move away from attacks on other Iraqis, even those regarded as collaborators, for fear such tactics will lose them support.

Al-Zarqawi and his ilk, however, seem determined to continue in the hope of igniting civil war between Shias and Sunnis. “They want blood, they want chaos — they want hell on Earth right here,” a Western diplomat said.

Times Recommends

• Should Knox’s trial even have reached the courtroom?
• 'Was it real?' The US bailout nightmare
• Iranian opposition plays the long game