BAGHDAD, (Reuters) – In a second day of major  bloodshed in Iraq, two female suicide bombers blew themselves up  outside a Shi’ite Muslim shrine in Baghdad yesterday, killing 60  people, police said.

The attack was the deadliest single incident in Iraq since a  truck bomb in Baghdad killed 63 people on June 17 last year. The  two-day death toll of at least 150 raises concerns that a recent  decline in violence may have been only a temporary lull.

At least 125 people were wounded in the blasts, which took  place within minutes of one another at the Imam Moussa al-Kadhim  shrine in the Shi’ite neighbourhood of Kadhimiya, police said.  Many of the dead and wounded were Iranian Shi’ite pilgrims.

Police said the attackers approached separate gates to the  shrine, which contains the tombs of two important holy men, or  imams, and has been a frequent target of Sunni Islamist  extremists who consider Shi’ite Muslims to be heretics.

“They used sidestreets to get there and this enabled them to  avoid checkpoints. They blew themselves up in the crowd,”  Major-General Jihad al-Jabiri, head of an Interior Ministry unit  that investigates explosions, told Reuters Television.

He said the attackers placed two leather bags full of  explosives among crowds flocking around the gates on Friday, the  Muslim holy day. They were detonated by grenades whose pull  rings were attached to strings and yanked from a short distance  away.