BAGHDAD, Jan. 9 £¨Xinhuanet£© -- At least five people were killed and dozens of others wounded in a bombing attack Friday outside a Shiite mosque in Baquba, some 60 km northeast of Baghdad, local first aid workers said.

   Relatives wailed while covering bodies of their loved ones, denouncing certain factions who intended to provoke a sectarian conflict.

   The bombing at the Haji Sadeq mosque came just after the end of main weekly Muslim noon prayers when the street was crowded with worshipers, said eyewitnesses.

   The type of the bomb or source of the attackers were not known, like nearly all the previous bombings in Iraq, though a car was seen burning in flames.

   A correspondent of the Qatar-based al-Jazeera TV station said a blown up cylinder was later found at the site of the blast, but she could not determine if the explosion was the result of an accident or a target attack.

   A deadly car bombing rocked a Shiite holy shrine in southern city of Najaf Last August, killing leading Shiite cleric Mohammed Baquer al-Hakim along with 81 others.

   Another time, a cylinder linked to a detonator went off at another Shiite leader's office in the Shiite holy city, 180 km south of Baghdad.

   While Shiite and Sunni Arab leaders called for unity among different ethnic and religious groups in post-Saddam Iraq, fears of ethnic crisis or even a civil war haunted the 25 million population. Enditem