A suicide bomber blew up an ambulance at an Iraqi police station near the city of Ramadi today, killing 14 people including women and children, a local hospital official said.
The official said the attack occurred in a village near Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
Earlier Iraq's Shia vice president and a cabinet minister were wounded in an apparent assassination attempt today.
A bomb killed six people at a ministry in Baghdad where they were attending an official ceremony.
Aides to Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi said he escaped with light wounds caused by shrapnel. Aides to the vice president, a member of the Shia majority that dominates the US-backed government, said he was later discharged from hospital.
Abdul-Mahdi is one of Iraq's two vice presidents.The other vice president is Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab.
Police sources said Public Works Minister Riad Ghareeb, also a Shia, had been seriously wounded when the bomb hidden at a ministry's meeting hall exploded.
The attack was the latest blow to Shia Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's crackdown in Baghdad, seen as a final attempt to halt all-out civil war.
While militants defied a new security crackdown in Baghdad, the Iraqi cabinet made a politically significant move by endorsing a draft oil law and sending it to parliament for approval, a senior Iraqi oil official said.
Passing an oil law that equally distributes Iraq's oil wealth among its warring ethnic and sectarian communities has been a key demand of the United States to keep its support for Mr al-Maliki's government.