Final Samarra casualties tally up to 51

SALAH AL-DIN / IraqiNews.com: The number of people killed from Saturday’s earlier bombing attack in Samarra city rose to 31 and the wounded to 20, according to a security source. Earlier, a medic said twenty-one people were killed and 25 others wounded in the bombing attack that targeted pilgrims of the Imam Hassan al-Askari shrine in Samarra. “Pilgrims of Imam Hassan al-Askari mausoleum were having lunch at Madayef Samarra restaurant, (3 km) north of Samarra, when a suicide bomber with an explosive belt blew himself up inside the restaurant,” a security source told Iraqi News. Askari is the 11th top holiest figure for Shiite Muslims. He was the son of Imam Ali al-Hadi and the father of the Messiah-like Imam al-Mahdi. He lived in Samarra and died there after it had become the capital of the Islamic Caliphate in the mid-Abbasid era. The 68-meter-tall gold dome of the two Askari Imams in Samarra, the largest city in the province of Salah al-Din, was destroyed in a powerful blast in February 2006, leading to a wave of a tit-for-tat sectarian violence that ran rampant in the central Iraq provinces and Baghdad. The same shrine was the target of another powerful bombing attack in June 2007, devastating what has been left of the two gold domes. Samarra lies 120 km north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.   AmR (TS)/SR 979