Telegraph Media Group: Rush Hour Bomb Blasts in Baghdad!

Attacks killed at least 57 people, as Iraq faced a political crisis, with its vice president accused of running death squads. The apparently coordinated blasts, which left at least 200 people wounded, were the first major sign of violence in a crisis that has threatened the country's fragile political truce, and heightened sectarian tensions. The attacks, the deadliest in more than two weeks, largely coincided with the morning rush hour, and security forces cordoned off bomb sites, AFP correspondents and officials said. They struck in the Allawi, Bab al-Muathem and Karrada districts of central Baghdad, the Adhamiyah, Shuala and Shaab neighborhoods in the north, Jadriyah in the east, Ghazaliyah in the west and Al-Amil and Dura in the south, the officials said. The violence comes with Iraqi politicians at loggerheads over the warrant issued for the arrest of Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki demanding that Kurdish authorities hand over the Sunni Arab leader, who is holed up in their autonomous region. Hashemi denies the charges. Maliki has also called for his Sunni deputy Saleh al-Mutlak, who belongs to the same Iraqiya bloc as Hashemi, to be sacked after he described the Shiite-led government as a "dictatorship".