BAGHDAD, Nov 24: Forty-eight people were killed in two suicide bombings in Iraq on Thursday — the latest in a series of attacks that have killed over 200 people since last Friday.

In the first incident, a suicide car bomber attacked a hospital in Mahmoudiya, 30kms south of Baghdad, killing 34 people and wounding 39.

Seven policemen and three soldiers of the Iraqi Army were among the dead.

The explosives-packed car detonated as Iraqi security forces were gathered outside Mahmoudiya General Hospital and as US civil affairs soldiers were visiting the facility to look at ways to improve it, the US army and witnesses said.

Four US troops were wounded in the blast, but most of those killed and injured were civilians, including Hoda Ali Mahmoud, a 30-year-old woman who had just visited the hospital with her young son, who needed treatment for a cold.

“The glass flew at us,” she said as she sat up in hospital. “His nose was hit and he couldn’t breathe.” The body of her son, less than two years old, lay on the morgue floor at Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad, where many of the wounded were brought.

Hasna Aboud’s son, who was due to get married next week, was also killed. “My 22-year-old son was killed while trying to bring me some medicine,” she said. “I lost my only son.”

In a statement, the US military said the hospital had been the target of the suicide attack, but the bomber had failed to penetrate its security barriers. The building suffered minor damage to its facade, and three nearby houses were badly hit.

Mahmoudiya has seen considerable violence in the past two years. It sits in an area dubbed the Triangle of Death for the frequency of attacks.

The area consists of a belt of mixed Sunni- and Shia-dominated towns where sectarian tensions have spilled over, leading to fears Iraq could be sliding towards a full-blown civil war.

The defence ministry in Baghdad said earlier that soldiers had found a car west of the capital filled with children’s toys booby-trapped with hand grenades and explosives, and a government spokesman said two people had been detained.

MARKET BOMBING: In the other incident, a suicide car bomber attacked a crowded market in Hilla, south of Baghdad, killing 14 people and wounding 23 others.

In February, a similar attack killed 125 people in Hilla, 100kms south of the capital, in the worst single blast in Iraq since the invasion began in March 2003.

Hilla is a mixed town of Sunnis and Shias, with a hard core of guerillas who frequently launch attacks. —Reuters