(Recasts)

By Sami al-Jumaili

KERBALA, Iraq, April 28 (Reuters) - A suicide car bomber killed 51 people and wounded 70 in the holy Iraqi Shi'ite city of Kerbala on Saturday, police and medical officials said.

The blast occurred at a checkpoint not far from an important shrine located among many shops and restaurants in Kerbala, 100 km (70 miles) southwest of Baghdad. The area was crowded at the time.

Salim Khadhim, a provincial health spokesman, told Reuters the blast killed 51 people. Khaled al-Ibrahimi, head of the Hussein General Hospital, confirmed the figure.

Television images showed a man running down a smoke-filled street holding a lifeless baby above his head. Smoke was rising off the child. Ambulances had rushed to the scene.

A suicide car bomber killed 40 people at a crowded bus station in the same area on April 14.

Earlier, the powerful Sh'ite cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr called U.S. President George W. Bush the Antichrist and urged him to heed calls by the opposition Democrats to withdraw from the chaos of Iraq.

Sadr, whose ministers quit Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government this month, renewed his demand for a U.S. pullout a day after Bush pledged to veto legislation that would require U.S. troops to begin leaving Iraq by Oct. 1.

Calling Bush "the greatest evil", Sadr said in a letter read out by a Sadrist MP in parliament that an eventual U.S. pullout would be a "victory for the Iraqi people".

"Here are the Democrats demanding that you withdraw at least with a timetable and you are stubborn against them," said Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia fought two uprisings against U.S. forces in 2004.

"You are like the one-eyed Antichrist. You look with one eye and refuse to look with the other," he said of Bush.

Bush has refused to set any timetable for a withdrawal, calling it a "surrender date". More than 3,300 U.S. troops have been killed in the increasingly unpopular war since the invasion in 2003.

Defying the veto threat, the Democratic-controlled Congress this week approved a $124 billion war spending measure that would require U.S. combat troops to leave by March 31, 2008.

Four years after Saddam Hussein's ouster, Iraq has been riven by sectarian violence between majority Shi'ites and once-dominant Sunni Arabs that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and pitched the country close to sectarian civil war. (Additional reporting by Ross Colvin)

AlertNet news is provided by