BAGHDAD, March 22 (AFP) - Iraq blamed Iran on Wednesday for a mortar attack that killed four people and wounded 38 in a busy district of Baghdad in apparent retaliation for a similar strike in Tehran claimed by Iran's armed opposition.
"A group of agents of the Iranian regime fired six mortar bombs at densely populated civilian areas of Baghdad" in the attack on Tuesday night, the official news agency INA said.
Iraq condemned the action as "flagrant aggression" and said it "reserves the right to retaliate in the appropriate manner," adding that a 60-mm mortar, two unexploded bombs, a compass and other equipment were found abandoned at the scene.
"Two Iraqis were killed as well as two other Arab nationals, while 38 others were wounded," INA said.
Azzam al-Ahmad, the Palestinian representative to Baghdad, said the other two dead were Palestinians and that the mortars hit the eastern district of Baladiyat, home to most of Iraq's Palestinian refugees.
INA said that hundreds of Iraqis and Palestinians attended the victims' funerals, chanting slogans against "agents in the pay of the Zionists."
Iraq's Youth Television, run by President Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, showed footage of the areas that had been hit, with their broken glass, bloodstains and wrecked buildings.
A witness told the television station he had heard "loud explosions then saw bloodied people stretched out on the roadway."
The television also showed men, women and children lying on hospital beds, their faces, hands or legs bandaged.
A local resident said Baladiyat's squares were filled with people celebrating the Muslim feast of Al-Adha and the Kurdish New Year at the time of the attack.
"It caused a huge panic," he said, adding that the number of dead was expected to rise "because many of the wounded were seriously hurt".
Iran's main armed opposition group, the People's Mujahedeen, has charged that Iranian agents fired several rockets last Saturday at one of its camps near the Iraqi town of Kut, without causing casualties.
The attack came a day after Iranian security services accused Iraq of helping two opposition fighters to sneak into Iran and carry out a mortar attack in northern Tehran.
The Iraq-based Mujahadeen claimed responsibility for the March 13 mortar attack, which left four people injured and caused major damage around a housing estate close to the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards.
The Iraqi military has said it shot down an Iranian pilotless plane on the same day near the border, as the Mujahedeen accused Tehran of stepping up reconnaissance flights to attack its bases inside Iraq.
Iraq's support for the Mujahedeen is a key obstacle to a normalization in relations with Iran, with which it fought a war from 1980-1988. Iran, meanwhile, hosts Iraqi Shiite opposition groups.
Ahmad, who is also Palestinian public works minister, said refugees were deliberately targeted in the Baghdad attack and claimed that the aim was "to damage relations" between Iraq and the Palestinians.
The "cowardly" attack "follows a well-prepared campaign of rumors ... that Baghdad was about to naturalize Palestinians and settle them in certain regions of Iraq," Ahmad said in a statement.
A London-based Arab newspaper, Al-Hayat, reported on March 4 that the Iraqi leadership had decided to allow Palestinian refugees to buy property and land in Iraq.
The decision, which has not been confirmed, raised fears among Kurds and Turcomans in northern Iraq that Palestinian refugees could be resettled on their lands, it said.
A leading member of Iraq's Baath party, Abdel Ghani Abdel Ghafour, visited the wounded in hospital on Wednesday and said "this odious crime by the Iranian regime will have no effect on the struggle for the liberation of Palestine."
