BAGHDAD — Four bombs ripped through Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad on Thursday evening, killing at least 40 people in the worst violence the capital has seen in months, Iraqi officials said. An American civilian aid specialist working to improve education in Iraq was killed in a separate attack.
The first three bombs went off in quick succession in a southwestern Baghdad neighborhood after 7 p.m. One targeted a Shiite mosque, another exploded outside a popular market, and the third went off inside the market where people were doing their evening shopping ahead of the Muslim weekend, Iraqi police officials said.
The officials said 34 people died and 82 others were injured in the three blasts. An official from Baghdad’s Yarmouk hospital confirmed the casualty figures.
About an hour later, a car bomb targeting a police patrol killed six people, including one police officer and five bystanders in a different neighborhood in southwestern Baghdad, hospital officials said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Sunni extremists such as al-Qaeda in Iraq tend to target Shiite mosques and neighborhoods and Iraqi security forces.
The American civilian killed earlier Thursday was Dr. Stephen Everhart, said a U.S. State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.
Everhart worked at the American University in Cairo, where he was associate dean of the business school and a finance professor. He was killed while working on a project to introduce a new business curriculum to a Baghdad university.
The State Department gave no information about how he was killed, but an Iraqi police official said American contractors were visiting a satellite office of Mustansiriyah University in eastern Baghdad when they were hit by a roadside bomb.
