Twin deadly blasts rock Baghdad's Sadr City Twin deadly explosions have rocked the Sadr City suburb of Baghdad, pictured. Photograph: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Two bombs exploded in a mainly Shia area of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 12 people and wounding 37, police and hospital sources said. One bomb was planted on a parked motorcycle and the other was a roadside device, a police source said. The attacks occurred in Sadr City in northeast Baghdad. There was a group of day labourers gathered, waiting to be hired for work. Someone brought his small motorcycle and parked it nearby. A few minutes later it blew up, killed some people, wounded others and burned some cars," said a police officer at the scene, declining to be named. A Reuters reporter said there were blood stains all around the site of the motorcycle bomb attack and that tarmac on the road had been ripped up by the explosion. Building tools and shoes were scattered across the site. Half an hour later a roadside bomb exploded near a small tea shop in the same neighbourhood, killing one person. Police said they found and defused two other bombs. Iraq is still plagued by a deadly Sunni Muslim insurgency and Shia militias nearly nine years after the US-led invasion. "People have real fears that the cycle of violence might be revived in this country," said Tariq Annad, a government employee who lives nearby told the Associated Press. Sadr City is a stronghold of radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi militia once fought US and Iraqi troops. He is now a key ally of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, also a Shia. Deadly attacks on Wednesday targeted the homes of police officers and a member of a government-allied militia. Those attacks, in the cities of Baqouba and Abu Ghraib outside Baghdad, killed four people, including two children, officials said. A political crisis that erupted shortly after US troops withdrew from Iraq on 18 December has revived concerns about sectarian strife in Iraq, which teetered on the brink of civil war in 2006-7. Maliki angered rivals when he asked parliament to have his Sunni deputy, Saleh al-Mutlaq, removed and sought an arrest warrant for Iraq's Sunni vice president, Tareq al-Hashemi, on charges he ran death squads. On Tuesday, members of the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc boycotted Iraq's parliament and cabinet, accusing Maliki's bloc of governing alone in a power-sharing coalition that was supposed to ease sectarian tensions. A spate of bombings that killed 72 people in mainly Shia areas of Baghdad a few days after the political crisis began have only deepened the fears of rising sectarian tensions. The inclusion of Iraqiya in the governing coalition was widely considered crucial to prevent a slide back into the kind of sectarian violence that was unleashed after the 2003 invasion. Thousands were killed in the violence. Many Sunnis have complained of being sidelined in the political process since Saddam Hussein was ousted and the majority Shia dominated the government.