A survivor of the blasts in a Baghdad hospital. (AFP)

Karbala, March 2 (Reuters): Karbala was in the grip of religious fervour, the city packed by two million Shia pilgrims marking their holiest day today when five explosions rent the sacred city asunder.

The pilgrims were beating their heads and chests and gashing their heads with swords in a show of grief for a revered figure who died more than 13 centuries ago when the blasts ripped the crowds apart.

The US military said a suicide bomber and mortars combined to kill at least 85 people, tearing men, women and children limb from limb shortly after 0700 GMT at the climax of ceremonies for the 10-day Ashura holiday. The US military said a near-simultaneous suicide bombing killed 58 more in the capital Baghdad 110 km north.

Many corpses were missing body parts or deeply blackened and yellowed from the heat of the blasts in Kerbala. A man’s scalp and ear lay on the ground alongside rotting fruit and a muddied pool of water.

Terrified and sobbing, many people ran for safety. But hundreds of others continued with their religious duties, reciting prayers and performing the closing rituals of Ashura.

Rescuers raced through the streets with bodies laden two or three high onto wooden vegetable carts, desperately searching for a doctor or an ambulance.

Doctors set up a makeshift hospital and treated the wounded as they lay out sweating in the sun. Some were missing limbs or had lost part of their intestines but were breathing and were put on saline drips. Shias who earlier had gashed open their heads with swords queued up to give blood to the wounded.

Men broke up empty wooden crates to use as splints for broken limbs. One man, his hair burnt off and singed skin peeling from his face, sat staring ahead, unable to speak or move as he waited to receive treatment. Some of those who died were carried away in a rubbish truck, while ambulances took the most severely wounded to hospital.

A witness said one of the blasts went off as Iranian pilgrims were performing rituals of self-flagellation. “They were beating themselves and then I heard a big explosion from a cart near them,” said Hassan Hadi.

“I turned and saw this carnage,” he added, pointing to a mass of blood and body parts still lying across the road.