In further violence, officials confirmed that about 45 Shi'ite Muslims were kidnapped over the last two weeks on the main highway to Syria and Jordan. The highway passes through Sunni insurgent strongholds west of Baghdad.
The deadliest attack yesterday occurred when a roadside bomb devastated a bus packed with Iraqi soldiers near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad. All 24 people aboard were killed, Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said. All but four of the dead were Iraqi soldiers, police said.
In Baghdad, 14 people died and 37 were wounded when a car bomb exploded at a bank where police and soldiers were picking up monthly paychecks, police Lieutenant Colonel Abbas Mohammed Salman said.
The blast set several other cars ablaze and scattered dismembered bodies along the street as bystanders carried the injured to ambulances.
Abdul-Hassan Mohammed, 62, a retired teacher who had gone to the bank to pick up his pension, said the explosion slammed him about 12 feet into a wall.
``My friends took me to one of their stores, gave me water, and asked me to relax," Mohammed said. ``I didn't even get my pension."
It was the third major attack in less than a week in Karradah, a fashionable, mostly Shi'ite neighborhood in central Baghdad that is home to several prominent politicians. Last Thursday, 31 people were killed in an attack that included rockets, mortars, and a car bomb.
On Monday, gunmen dressed in military fatigues abducted 26 people from the offices of the Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce and a nearby mobile phone company.
The British soldier was fatally wounded in a mortar barrage before dawn yesterday on a British base in the southern city of Basra, the British Defense Ministry said. Britain has lost 115 soldiers in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003.
There was no claim of responsibility for the barrage. But it followed a crackdown by the British on Shi'ite militias that have infiltrated security forces in the city and threaten the authority of the government in Baghdad.
