BAGHDAD (AFP) -- At least 16 people were killed across Iraq on Monday, including eight troops and four pilgrims, a day after a suicide bomber killed 48 devotees in an attack U.S. officials blamed on Al-Qaeda.

In a brazen late afternoon assault gunmen ambushed a passing Iraqi army patrol in the town of Bohruz in the restive Diyala province, spraying it with bullets and killing seven soldiers and an officer.
Iraqi army Brigadier General Ragib al-Omairi, commander in Baquba, the capital of Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, said the attack killed Major Salim Ghaluz and seven men.
Earlier on Monday, a group of Shiite pilgrims heading to the central city of Karbala for the Arbaeen ceremony on Thursday was hit by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, killing four of them, including three women, security officials said.
They said 15 other pilgrims were wounded in the blast.
Tens of thousands of Shiite faithful are vulnerable to attack as they walk to Karbala from across the country to attend the Arbaeen ceremony, the 40th day marking the slaying of a seventh century imam.
The attack came after at least 48 people were killed on Sunday when a suicide bomber detonated a vest filled with explosives at a rest stop used by Shiite pilgrims on their way to Karbala, hospital and security officials said.
At least 68 people were also wounded in the attack in the town of Iskandiriyah just south of Baghdad, medics in the nearby town of Hilla and police said.
The injured were treated in three different hospitals in the area, said a Hilla hospital doctor who declined to give his name.