World Bulletin / News Desk

Two bomb blasts in the southern Iraqi city of Samawa Sunday killed at least 36 people with another 90 injured according to security and medical officials.

"The hospitals have received 35 dead," a senior official in the Muthanna health department, which covers Samawa, said. An officer in Muthanna Operations Command confirmed the toll.

They said at least 90 people were also wounded in the blasts in Samawa, 230 kilometres (145 miles) south of Baghdad.

"Two car bombs went off in town. The first one was at around midday near a bus station in the city centre," a senior police officer in Muthanna province said.

"The other exploded about five minutes later, 400 metres from the spot of the first explosion," he said.

Adel Mohamed, an official at the Muthanna Health Department, said most of those killed were civilians, adding that many of those injured were in critical condition.

Samawa is the capital of Muthanna and lies deep in Iraq's Shiite heartland and such attacks there are rare.

Muthanna also borders Saudi Arabia and a vast Iraqi desert that connects the troubled province of Anbar with the south.

A car bomb just outside Baghdad on Saturday killed at least 23 people, according to security and medical sources.

That attack targeted Shiite faithful walking to the northern Baghdad shrine of Imam Musa Kadhim, the seventh of 12 imams revered in Shiite Islam.

The Iraqi capital remains on high security alert for a whole week as the faithful walk from all over the country to commemorate Imam Kadhim.

The ISIL group, which considers Shiites heretics, almost systematically attempts to target pilgrims marching to holy sites during Iraq's many religious commemorations.

But there was no immediate indication that the attacks in Samawa specifically targeted Shiite pilgrims.