At least three people were killed and 15 others wounded in a car bomb explosion in a Shiite district in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad on Sunday, a police source said.
The attack occurred in the afternoon when a booby-trapped car detonated near a popular restaurant in Shula district in northwestern Baghdad, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
Violence and sectarian tensions have been running high between the Sunni and Shiite communities since late December 2012, when the Sunni Muslims started their protests against the Shiite-led government in six of Iraq's predominantly Sunni provinces and the Sunni districts in Baghdad.
However, the worst security situation in Iraq began to drastically deteriorate since June 10 when bloody clashes broke out between Iraqi security forces and hundreds of Sunni militants who took control of the country's northern city of Mosul and later seized swathes of territories after the Iraqi security forces abandoned their posts in Nineveh and other predominantly Sunni provinces.

Source: XINHUA