KARBALA, Iraq - Grieving relatives collected the bodies of the dead from overwhelmed hospitals today after devastating suicide bombings against Shiite Muslim pilgrims, and officials said Iraqi police and U.S. troops detained 15 people, some possibly Iranians, in the attacks.

Also today, three rockets hit a telephone exchange building in Baghdad, knocking out international phone service for much of the country only days after the system was put back in service. One Iraqi worker was killed and another injured.

There were contradictory death tolls from Tuesday's bombings at Baghdad's Kazimiya shrine and holy sites in Karbala, 50 miles to the south.

U.S. administrators' death count was lowered from 143 to 117, a senior coalition official said today. Iraq's Health Ministry said 185 people died. Estimates of the wounded ranged from 300 to more than 400.

As authorities slowly identified the dead, relatives picked up their slain loved ones from Karbala's al-Hussein hospital this morning. Others wept as they scanned handwritten lists of names posted on the hospital walls. Iranian pilgrims, speaking in Farsi, struggled to communicate with the Iraqi hospital officials.

Some carried their relatives' bodies through the city's two main shrines, the tombs of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, for blessings, then took them to a nearby mosque to lay out before burial.

The confusion reflected the chaos of Tuesday's events, when the large blasts went off among thousands of pilgrims from Iraq and around the world marking the holiest day of the Shiite calendar, the mourning ceremony of Ashoura. Some of the explosions came from suicide attackers, others from explosives apparently brought in on wooden pushcarts.

U.S. and Iraqi officials pointed to an al-Qaida-linked Jordanian militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as a "prime suspect," saying he aims to spark a Shiite-Sunni civil war in Iraq.

It appeared other attacks had been planned. Iraqi officials said suicide bombers were arrested in Basra. In Kirkuk, police found a bomb with 22 pounds of TNT alongside a road where Shiites had planned to march. The bomb was defused and the march canceled at police request.

In Najaf, police arrested two people carrying explosives near the Imam Ali shrine.