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Double car bombings and a homemade bomb tore apart Baghdad marketplaces on Monday, killing at least 71 people on Monday, a well-informed police source said.

In the deadliest attack, twin devices ripped through the Shorja wholesale market, killing over 60 people and wounding 150, police said. Interior Ministry sources said the coordinated blasts came from a car bomb and a roadside bomb.

Huge clouds of black smoke and flames belched from a multi-storey building used by wholesale clothing merchants, turning the sky black above the debris-strewn street.

The blasts, which rang across Baghdad, turned market stalls to mangled wrecks among which wooden carts carried badly wounded survivors with bandaged legs, arms and heads.

"I saw three bodies shredded apart and people wounded being transported by ambulances," said witness Wathiq Ibrahim. "Paramedics were picking up body pieces and human flesh from the pools of blood on the ground and placing them in small plastic bags."

One old woman railed against the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who has accepted a US-backed security plan in Baghdad, viewed as a last-ditch effort to prevent all-out civil war between majority Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs.

"They've killed all our sons. What have they left for us?" she shouted.

A separate roadside bomb attack at the Bab al-Sharji market, also in central Baghdad and home to both Sunni and Shi'ite Arab traders, killed at least five people, police sources said.

The attacks occurred a as Shi'ite government officials, including Maliki, marked several minutes of silence to commemorate the first anniversary under the Islamic calendar of the bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra. Under the Gregorian calendar the bombing was on February 22.

Earlier, Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani urged his followers not to seek revenge against Sunnis.

He referred to the Samarra bombing, blamed on Sunni militants, as having plunged Iraq into a cycle of "blind violence".

The latest wave of sectarian violence have caused tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties since the destruction of the al-Askari mosque, one of the holiest in Shi'ite Islam. The widespread bloodshed has further caused hundreds of thousands to be displaced.

"We call on the believers as they mark this sad occasion and express their feelings ... to exercise maximum levels of restraint and not to do or say anything which would harm our Sunni brothers who are innocent for what happened and who do not accept it," Sistani said in a statement.

The reclusive Sistani, who resides in the holy city of Najaf and leads the Marjaiya (Shi'ite religious establishment), is regarded as a voice of moderation.

In another development, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier confirmed Monday that two German citizens were missing in Iraq since last week and may have been abducted.

"It is true, since Tuesday last week two German nationals have been missing in the country," he told reporters as he arrived for talks in Brussels with his EU counterparts. "It cannot be ruled out that we are talking about a forced kidnapping here."

Steinmeier said that a German governmental crisis group had convened on February 6 to discuss possible measures.

"We're doing all that we can to ensure that the two hostages return to their families healthy and well," he added.

A report in Monday's edition of the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper said that the two were abducted several days ago in Baghdad. So far, no details have emerged about the missing pair.

(China Daily via agencies February 13, 2007)