At least 58 people were killed in attacks across Iraq yesterday, including a car bomb outside a French consulate.

Iraq's conflict has eased since its height in 2006-2007 when sectarian slaughter killed thousands. But Sunni Islamists and an al-Qaeda affiliate still launch about one major attack a month in an effort to reignite tensions between Shia and Sunni Muslims following the US military withdrawal in December.

And fuelling the sectarian division, an Iraqi judge yesterday sentenced fugitive Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, a top critic of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, to death by hanging for the murder of a lawyer and a brigadier general, an AFP correspondent reported.

Hashemi, tried in absentia, has dismissed all charges against him as politically motivated. His secretary and son-in-law Ahmed Qahtan was also tried in absentia and sentenced to death.

The trial, which began in May, covered the first of around 150 charges levelled against Hashemi, one of Iraq's most senior Sunni officials, and his bodyguards, who have been accused of running a death squad. Infighting in Iraq's delicate cross-sectarian government, and a resurgence of the al-Qaeda wing, have raised fears of a return to widespread violence, especially as Iraq struggles to contain spillover from the growing conflict in Syria.

On the ground, the most serious of the bombings, blasts and shootings yesterday happened near the city of Amara, 300 km south of Baghdad, when two car bombs exploded outside a

Shia shrine and a market place, killing at least 16 people, officials said.

Overnight in Dujail, 50 km north of Baghdad, gunmen and a suicide bomber driving a car attacked a military base, killing 11 soldiers and injuring seven, police said.

Later, a car bomb killed eight people queuing for jobs as police guards for the Iraqi North Oil Company in the flashpoint city of Kirkuk, 250 km north of Baghdad, police said.

Kirkuk was hit by several

other blasts. A car bomb and a bomb packed into a motorcycle detonated outside a crime investigation office, killing seven and wounding 40.

More people were killed in several other blasts across the country, including in the towns of Baquba, Samarra, Basra andTuzKhurmato.

The car bomb that exploded outside the French consular building in the usually stable city of Nassiriya, 300 km south of Baghdad, killed a police guard and wounded fourotherguards.