NOURI AL-MALIKI, the Iraqi Prime Minister, will meet Tony Blair in London today to discuss the crisis in Baghdad, where the new leader’s much-touted security plan has failed to stem the bloodshed that is dragging the city to the point of breakdown.

As he flew out of his embattled capital yesterday at least 63 people were killed in bomb attacks and a dozen were shot dead in relentless drive-by shootings or kidnapped and murdered.

Mr al-Maliki, a Shia conservative who came to power in May, initiated his Baghdad security plan more than a month ago. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers flooded the city in a last-ditch effort to stop sectarian warfare that claimed more than 3,000 lives last month alone. Mr al-Maliki will meet Mr Blair, as well as Margaret Becket, the Foreign Secretary, and Des Browne, the Defence Secretary.

On Tuesday he will arrive in Washington to discuss with President Bush fresh ways of curbing the killing, including deploying additional US troops in the capital — a significant turnabout for the US military, which had hoped to move its forces out of Iraqi cities and hand over security to local troops. As the bombings demonstrated yesterday in the militant Shia Baghdad district of Sadr City and the tense northern oil city of Kirkuk, the country is still mired in violence that appears to be getting worse.

In Sadr City, a stronghold of the al-Mahdi Army militia led by the radical Shia cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, a van full of explosives blew up at a market outside a police station, killing at least 34 people and wounding more than 70.

Soon afterwards another bomb went off in front of the district town hall, killing eight more people.

Hours later another car bomb killed 21 people and wounded almost 100 in Kirkuk, a tense ethnic mixture of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen that is claimed by the nearby autonomous region of Kurdistan as its future capital.

The attacks appeared designed to provoke further violence. The Sadr City blast followed a night of fighting between US troops and Shia death squads believed to be affiliated to the al-Mahdi Army militia. After hours of gunfire the coalition forces freed two Iraqi hostages.

As well as the security plan, which Iraqi and US officials agree has fallen short of expectations, Mr al-Maliki has staked his last hopes of preventing the total collapse of his country on a reconciliation council that met for the first time over the weekend to try to thrash out differences between the various Sunni and Shia Arab factions, as well as the Kurdish parties.

The council has said that it is ready to talk to Sunni insurgent groups, but officials say that it is difficult to determine how many guerrilla fighters their would-be interlocutors speak for.

The main Sunni group in parliament did not attend the reconciliation meeting, casting doubt on the process.

Hoshyar Zebari, the Foreign Minister, gave warning in an interview last week that the country had only two months to solve the sectarian war or face possible meltdown. A senior Western official said that the Government had a maximum of six months to ensure that the reconciliation process gained ground and started to slow the rate of killing.

“The worst-case scenario is the place falls apart,” he said. “We might win. It’s not inevitable that we win, but neither is it inevitable that we’ll lose. It’s in the balance.” The official added that there would be many more killings even if the Government did prevail. “It’ll be a messy process,” he said.

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