(Updates with new bombing)

By Waleed Ibrahim

BAGHDAD, April 19 (Reuters) - A suicide car bomber killed 10 people in Baghdad on Thursday, a day after militants killed almost 200 in the capital's bloodiest day since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, despite a security crackdown.

War-weary Iraqis vented their anger at the Baghdad security plan which has cut sectarian murders blamed on Shi'ite militias but failed to stop car bombings and other large-scale attacks blamed on al Qaeda.

Police said a bomber rammed his car into a fuel tanker in the religiously-mixed neighbourhood of Jadriya on Thursday, also wounding 21 people. Black smoke billowed into the sky as flames engulfed the car and the tanker, television footage showed.

Suspected Sunni al Qaeda militants detonated a string of bombs in mostly Shi'ite areas of Baghdad on Wednesday, the worst day of violence in the city since the last-ditch plan to stop Iraq sliding into civil war was launched in February.

In the worst attack, 140 people were killed in a truck bombing in the Sadriya neighbourhood.

The U.S. military said Wednesday's blasts appeared to be the work of Sunni Islamist al Qaeda and were coordinated.

In Sadriya, angry residents cursed the Shi'ite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for failing to protect them. Smoke still billowed from the debris and sandals and glass littered the ground in Sadriya.

"The government is talking about the security plan but dozens of people are dying every day. No one is protecting us," Sabah Haider, 42, told Reuters as he stood beside a dozen incinerated minibuses.

Rahim Ali, also in Sadriya, said: "The Americans say they are here to protect the Iraqi people but they are doing nothing".

SECURITY

The security plan calls for 30,000 extra U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqi soldiers to be deployed mostly in Baghdad.

While it has curbed militia murders, the car bombings have raised fears of a new outbreak of reprisals, especially among the Mehdi Army militia of anti-U.S. Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The Mehdi Army, blamed for widespread killings of Sunni Arabs after a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra was destroyed in February 2006, has kept a low profile during the crackdown.

Maliki said on Wednesday Iraqis would take security control of the whole country from foreign forces by the end of the year.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in Tel Aviv on Wednesday the bombers were trying to disrupt national reconciliation and expressed fears Shi'ites could be losing patience with Maliki's government and U.S. forces.

"We can only hope that the Shi'ites will have the confidence in their government and in the coalition that we will go after the people that perpetrated this horror," Gates said.

Maliki, from Iraq's majority Shi'ite community, is under pressure to say when foreign forces will leave Iraq and maintains they will only go when Iraqi security forces are ready to replace them.

But Wednesday's attacks underscored the challenges for Iraqi forces in taking charge of overall security from more than 150,000 U.S. and British troops.

Hours before the bombings, at a ceremony marking the handover of the fourth province of Iraq's 18 provinces from U.S.-led troops to Iraqis, Maliki had again appealed for reconciliation between Shi'ites and the once-dominant Sunnis.

Maliki ordered the arrest late on Wednesday of the Iraqi army commander in charge of security in Sadriya for failing to secure the area.

Brigadier Qassim Moussawi, the Iraqi spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, said the attack in Sadriya was carried out by a truck bomb. (Additional reporting by Aseel Kami and Yara Bayoumy)

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