Forty-five victims of execution-style killings were found and more than a dozen people were reported killed in violence across Iraq, reinforcing fears that the country remains on the brink of civil war as it seeks to finalise a new government.
The deadliest single attack on Sunday was a car bombing in the southern city of Karbala, a Shiite pilgrimage centre.
"We have received 15 bodies of people killed in the car bomb attack," Ali Mussa, a medic at Karbala hospital's emergency ward, told news agency AFP.
Handcuffed bodies
A few hours earlier, Iraqi police said they had found the handcuffed bullet-riddled bodies of 45 men killed in apparent sectarian attacks.
Twenty eight bodies were found in Baghdad's western Kharkh area, while another 15 were recovered from the eastern Rusafa district. Two other bodies were found south of Baghdad.
Hundreds of bodies have been discovered across Iraq over the past few months, mostly in Baghdad, of men killed in tit-for-tat sectarian clashes between Shiites and Sunnis.
Early on Sunday the Iraqi capital was rocked by a pair of powerful car bombs that killed nine people.
The first suicide car bombing was in the Sunni Adhamiyah neighborhood targetting an Iraqi army patrol, killing eight people and wounding 20 others.
The second car bombing hit the Waziriyah neighborhood, killing one civilian and wounding five others.
In other separate attacks on Sunday, at least nine people were killed, including six policemen.
Iraq, which is still without a government nearly five months after its election, has been engulfed in a vicious circle of sectarian violence since the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in the northern town of Samarra on February 22.
Helicopter crash
The latest bloodshed came a day after a British helicopter was apparently shot down in the southern city of Basra, prompting clashes as a furious mob tried to impede recovery efforts.
The British military in Basra said five of its troops had perished in the crash, although the Ministry of Defence in London would only say there were no more than five people on board the stricken craft.
The crash sparked bloody clashes on Saturday with at least five Iraqis killed and dozens wounded when British troops sent to recover their dead from the crashed Lynx helicopter clashed with an angry mob.
British military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Eaton, said the situation at the site was under control and troops had completed recovering the wreckage of the helicopter that crashed in the largely residential district of Al-Rabbat.
Britain has about 8,000 soldiers deployed in and around Basra. Not including the death toll from Saturday, it has lost 104 soldiers, 79 of them in combat operations, since joining the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Basra has been relatively calm compared to the more restive central provinces but British troops have often clashed with the local authorities or the Shiite militias in the city.
Kurdish administration
On the political front, Kurdish lawmakers in northern Iraq's Kurdistan voted for a single administration to run their autonomous region, ending the previous system of two separate local governments.
Until now, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
(PUK) was solely responsible for running Sulaimaniyah province, and Kurdish regional president Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) was running Arbil and Dohuk.
With the unanimous vote, the two administrations were merged into one single administration and a new cabinet was set to be formed.
The single administration is expected to reaffirm Kurdish territorial claims, especially for the ethnically mixed oil-hub of Kirkuk that Kurds consider their own and is located just south of their autonomous region.