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Suicide attack against Iraqi police building kills nine

A suicide bomber slammed his explosives-laden truck into a police building near the northern Iraqi city of Tikrit yesterday, killing nine policemen and wounding dozens, police said.

The bomber detonated the vehicle against a building belonging to the police department in an area called Albu Ajil, east of Tikrit, on the main road between the city and the oil hub of Kirkuk, police officials said.

At least 40 people, many of them policemen, were wounded in the attack that took place at 10:15am, they said.

"Nine policeman have died in the blast and 40 more are wounded, mostly policemen," said police Major Abdul Karim Mohammed, a security official at Tikrit general hospital.

Following the blast, Tikrit police announced on loudspeakers an indefinite curfew in the city.

Insurgents have repeatedly targeted the country's security forces in a bid to derail attempts to restore stability in the war torn country.

Yesterday's attack was second in as many days against the security forces.

Meanwhile, police and wit-nesses in Baghdad said overnight clashes between US troops and Shiite militiamen left at least five people dead and 19 wounded in an eastern district. The US military had no immediate comment on the reports.

The fighting in the predominantly Shiite Fidhiliyah area on the Baghdad's outskirts broke out after a US military convoy came under attack near the local offices of Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-US cleric whose Mahdi Army militia has recently stepped up attacks on US troops, according to police officers in the area who declined to be identified because they weren't authorized to release the information.

Video footage shot yesterday showed the charred skeleton of what appeared to be a Humvee and a low-flying Apache helicopter firing flares at several hundred people, mostly teenagers and children, who gathered around the smoldering vehicle.
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