Nine killed, 75 injured in bomb blast in Iraq

BAGHDAD: At least nine people were killed and 75 wounded when an unoccupied building blew up in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Wednesday, just as police arrived to investigate a tip that weapons were inside, police said.

Women and children were among the victims, police said, but it was unclear if they were on the street outside the building at the time or if the explosion had damaged nearby houses.

Witnesses described the blast as one of the biggest explosions ever heard in ethnically and religiously mixed Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, and said a huge plume of smoke rose above the largest city in northern Iraq.

Brigadier-General Abdul Kareem al-Jubouri, head of the operations room in the Mosul police command, said police had been tipped off that a large cache of explosives and weapons were in the building.

"It seems that when the insurgents discovered that police and army forces had reached the building, they detonated (the explosives)," Jubouri said.

Police had appealed for heavy equipment to help free people possibly trapped by debris, Jubouri said.

Mosul is the capital of Nineveh province, one of Iraq's northern regions where US and Iraqi forces this year have launched offensives against Sunni Islamist Al-Qaida fighters who are most often blamed for large-scale bombings in Iraq.

The offensives were carried out after Al-Qaida militants were squeezed from former strongholds in western Anbar province and areas around Baghdad by security crackdowns last year.

In another attack in northern Iraq, a suicide car bomb killed seven people and wounded 16 others about 40 km (25 miles) from the city of Kirkuk, police said.

Despite persistent bombings in northern Iraq, violence has fallen sharply across the country, with overall attacks down by 60 percent since last June.

US and Iraqi officials credit the deployment of an extra 30,000 US troops and the growing use of mainly Sunni Arab neighbourhood police units in areas where local citizens turned against Al-Qaida for the drop in violence.

US soldiers, backed by attack aircraft, killed 20 suspected Al-Qaida fighters in raids in northern Iraq over the past two days, the US military said.

In the biggest operation, US ground troops seeking an Al-Qaida network leader near the Diyala provincial capital Baquba called in air support after encountering a number of militants who took up "fighting positions".

"Responding in self-defence, the ground force called supporting aircraft to engage the hostile force, killing 10 terrorists," the US military said in a statement.

Another three were killed in a nearby building and weapons caches including machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, roadside bombs, artillery and mortar rounds and other ammunition were also found, the military said.

Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, and Mosul have become the two biggest headaches for US and Iraqi security forces battling Al-Qaida, which the military calls the greatest threat to security in Iraq.