A suicide truck bomb killed eight policemen and wounded dozens more at a police station north of Baghdad today in the latest assault by insurgents on Iraq's security forces, police said.
They said the bomb largely destroyed the station in the village of Albu-Ajeel in Salahaddin province. Many police were initially trapped under rubble, including one officer who called for help on his mobile phone, police said.
Among the dead were five officers, including two colonels, police in the nearby provincial capital Tikrit said. More than 30 police were among some 50 people wounded.
Sunni Islamist al Qaeda and other militant groups have stepped up attacks on Iraq's security forces across the country in recent weeks, seeking to undermine a four-month-old US-backed security plan in Baghdad and nearby regions.
The crackdown has driven some militants out of Baghdad into surrounding towns and cities, especially into Diyala province just north of Baghdad but also Salahaddin, where they have launched attacks on civilians and US and Iraqi forces.
A curfew had been imposed on Albu-Ajeel, which lies some 175km north of Baghdad.
While several police and hospital sources said only one truck bomb was used, another police official said a second vehicle, a car, was believed to have exploded just after the truck bomb detonated.
One police official said an officer who was trapped under rubble made a frantic call to the Tikrit police operations room.
"We are under the building, which collapsed on us. We think it was a car bomb," the official quoted the officer as saying.
The attack on the police station came a day after a suicide truck bomber killed 12 soldiers at an Iraqi army checkpoint south of Baghdad.
In overnight violence in Baghdad, three people were killed and 17 wounded during clashes between US forces and gunmen in the New Baghdad district, police and witnesses said.
They said the clashes broke out after US forces were shot at while raiding a neighbourhood near an office of the anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Details of the fighting were sketchy, and the US military said it was looking into the reports.