[Al Arabiya Latest] Three men were sentenced to death by hanging on Tuesday after being convicted of helping to plan an al-Qaeda truck bombing in northern Iraq in June that killed 72 people.A judge at Rusafa criminal court in central Baghdad said the court "sentences to death by hanging Adnan Jassim Ali al-Juburi, Walid Mahmoud Mohammed al-Hamdani and Jawad Falah al-Hamdani."
He cited "sufficient evidence of their involvement in the planning and execution of the bombing in Taza."
The judge's name cannot be published for security reasons.
A suicide bomber detonated a truck packed with explosives as worshippers left a crowded Shiite Muslim mosque on June 20 in Taza, near Kirkuk, north of Baghdad. Victims included women and children, and the blast flattened dozens of homes nearby.
Abdul-Sattar al-Birqdar, spokesman for Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council, put the death toll at 88.
The men can appeal the sentence. Birqdar said they had carried out the attack, but declined to outline their specific involvement or relationship to the suicide bomber.
A statement from the National Media Centre said the suspects confessed to carrying out the attack.
Most similar attacks are attributed to Sunni Islamist insurgents, who view Shiites as heretics, and to supporters of Sunni Arab Saddam Hussein's outlawed Baath party.
Violence has fallen sharply in Iraq in the last two years, but bombings and shootings remain common.
Relatively few convictions for such blasts are handed down, partly due to the high volume of attacks and the lack of experience in modern forensic techniques among Iraqi forces.
The Taza convictions come as Iraq prepares for a March 7 parliamentary election, and as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki struggles to defend his reputation for quelling violence in Iraq after a series of major bombings in Baghdad in recent months.