KHALED FARHAN
KUFA

A SUICIDE bomber killed 16 people and wounded 70 at a crowded market in Iraq's Shi'ite city of Kufa yesterday, the latest in a string of sectarian attacks blamed on al Qaeda Sunni militants.

Witnesses said the bomber blew himself up in an open-air market packed with shoppers in central Kufa, near the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf. "I saw the minibus coming through the crowds. There was one person driving. He tried to park the vehicle and then it exploded. There were many bodies," said one witness, Mohan Ali.

Provincial spokesman Ahmed Duaibi blamed al Qaeda. Sunni Islamist al Qaeda, which US and Iraqi officials accuse of trying to tip Iraq into full-scale civil war between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs, has stepped up attacks in the southern Shi'ite heartland in recent weeks.

George W Bush, fighting calls to set a timetable for a US withdrawal from a war that has killed more than 3300 troops, has said al Qaeda is "public enemy number one" in Iraq.

In Washington, the Pentagon said it had told another 35,000 US soldiers they were in line to go to Iraq, a move that gives commanders enough forces to maintain a security crackdown there until at least the end of the year.

Meanwhile, an al Qaeda front organisation threatened in a video to kill nine abducted Iraqi security officers in 72 hours unless their demands, including the release of all Sunni women from Iraqi prisons, were met. The video showed the five army officers and four policemen, lined up in a room, their hands bound, in front of a black banner of the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group of Iraqi insurgent groups.

The Islamic State of Iraq claimed on Monday that it had abducted the nine in Diyala province, north of Baghdad.

There was no immediate confirmation from the government that the men were seized.-AP/Reuters