Death toll in Iraq mosque bombing climbs to 87

BAGHDAD, June 20 (Reuters) The death toll from a suicide truck bombing that partly demolished a Shi'ite mosque in Baghdad yesterday has risen to 87 overnight, police said today.

Doctors had warned that the toll, which police initially put at 78, could rise because many of the wounded were badly hurt.

It was the second worst bombing in Baghdad since US and Iraqi forces launched a crackdown in February in the capital aimed at halting Iraq's spiral into all-out sectarian civil war.

A car bomb on April 18 killed 140 near a Baghdad market.

In yesterday's attack a suspected al Qaeda bomber rammed a truck packed with half a tonne of TNT and gas cylinders into the Khilani mosque, just as 10,000 US and Iraqi troops began an offensive to root out car bomb cells north of the capital.

REUTERS AK KP1454