Two suicide bombers strapped with explosives killed at least 74 people and reduced two crowded Shi'ite mosques to rubble during Friday prayers in the northeast Iraqi town of Khanaqin.

More bodies were trapped, said Ibrahim Ahmed Bajalan, a member of the Diyala provincial council. "I think there are more than 100 people dead," he said. Another lesser blast was reported near a bank in the town, police said.

Kamaran Ahmed, the director of Khanaqin hospital, said 74 people had been confirmed killed and 150 wounded. He said many bodies were too badly mutilated to identify.

The attacks in the mixed Shi'ite and Kurdish town near the border with Iran seemed certain to fuel sectarian tensions ahead of a Dec. 15 election that Washington hopes will pave the way for peace and democracy 2-1/2 years after the US-led invasion.

Two car bombs detonated Friday morning in a central Baghdad residential neighborhood, killing at least six people and injuring 40 more, near an Interior Ministry building where US troops found detainees who showed signs of torture, police said.

The blast in the Jadiriyah neighborhood reverberated through the city center, sent a mushroom cloud hundreds of feet into the air and was followed by sporadic small arms fire.

TV footage showed several residential buildings collapsed from the blast and there was a large crater in the road. Neighbors dug through debris and under toppled blast barriers to pull victims from the rubble.

Police Major Raeid Mohamedawi said the two car bombs were detonated behind the Interior Ministry building.

US troops found up to 173 malnourished detainees some showing signs of torture in the building on Sunday. Most were believed to be Sunni Arabs, the main group behind the insurgency.

A leader of a major Sunni party, Tariq al-Hashimi, told Iraq's Sharqiyah television on Thursday that his group had submitted 50 complaints of prisoner abuse to the government "but we did not receive a timely response."

However, Interior Minister Bayn Jabr, a Shi'ite, brushed aside the complaints, denied sectarian bias and claimed that "every time" al-Hashimi has differences with him, "he exerts pressure on me through the US Embassy."

"I reject torture and I will punish those who perform torture," Jabr said. "No one was beheaded, no one was killed" a clear reference to the beheadings of foreign and Iraqi hostages by insurgents including al-Qaida's Iraq wing.

He also said "those who are supporting terrorism are making the exaggerations" about torture and that only seven detainees showed signs of abuse.

In a statement Thursday, the US Embassy said Iraqi authorities had given assurances that they will investigate the conditions of detainees found Sunday night and that the abuse of prisoners "will not be tolerated by either the Iraqi Government" or US-led forces anywhere in the country.

"We have made clear to the Iraqi Government that there must not be militia or sectarian control or direction of Iraqi security forces, facilities or ministries," the US statement added.

Prominent Sunni Arabs have complained for months about abuse by Interior Ministry forces, whom they claim have been infiltrated by Shi'ite militias. The Sunnis called for an international investigation after the Jadriyah detainees were found.

The government denies the militia allegations.

Last May, however, officials confirmed that a Shi'ite militia affiliated with Jabr's party helped capture five men wanted in a fatal car bombing in east Baghdad. Another Shi'ite militia took part in a joint raid with police last month southeast of the capital in which about 20 people were killed.

The US statement seemed designed to reassure the Sunni Arab minority that the Americans are keen to defend their interests at a time when Washington is encouraging a big Sunni Arab turnout in the December 15 election hoping that will help take the steam out of the insurgency.

US officials have refused to say how many detainees showed signs of torture and whether most were Sunnis, pending completion of an Iraqi investigation.

Major General Rick Lynch told reporters that American soldiers, led by US Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, went to the Jadriyah facility because a 15-year-old boy was believed to be held there illegally. Interior Ministry officers denied the US troops entry until Horst telephoned Jabr, who ordered his staff to allow the Americans inside, Lynch said.

"When he entered the facility, General Horst saw 169 individuals that had been detained. Some of those individuals looked like they had been abused, malnourished and mistreated," Lynch said.

In a nationally televised press conference, Jabr, the interior minister, delivered a spirited defense of his agency and said the detainees included Shiites and Sunnis _ some among the most "dangerous terrorists" in the country.

The spokesman for a Sunni clerical association insisted that torture was widespread within the Interior Ministry and his group would not trust the findings of any investigation in which the Iraqi government played a role.

"We are not accusing anybody, but our people are being arrested by (Interior Ministry units) and then their bodies are found," Abdul-Salam al-Kubais of the Association of Muslim Scholars said. "If the minister is not aware of this, then he should resign."

The two bombing were also near a hotel in Baghdad that houses foreign journalists, the second attack on international media in less than a month.

Some officials at the scene believed the Hamra Hotel in the Jadriyah District was the target.

Meanwhile, the first blast knocked down the blast walls protecting the hotel, blowing out windows.

Iraq's Deputy Interior Minister, Major General Hussein Kamal, said the first bomb was designed to breach blast walls protecting the Hamra.

It would be the second attack against a hotel housing international journalists since the October 24 triple vehicle bomb attack against the Palestine Hotel, where many journalists live and work.

(China Daily November 19, 2005)