Car bomb causes carnage in Baghdad

A car bomb exploded outside an office used by US soldiers in northern Iraq, killing one Iraqi and wounding six Americans and 41 Iraqis.

The wounded included children from nearby houses and Iraqi Kurdish guards. Firefighters battled to put out car fires at the scene of the blast in Irbil, the largest city in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

Staff Sgt Shane Slaughter, US military spokesman in Baghdad, said that the six injured Americans were Department of Defence personnel. He did not say if they were military or civilian.

He said that the military was investigating the bombing, which happened yesterday at 10.05pm. There were no claims of responsibility.

US soldiers flew to the site by helicopter and cordoned off the area together with local Iraqi Kurdish fighters, reported CNN-Turk, a Turkish subsidiary of US-based CNN.

A Turkish reporter at the scene said by telephone that the blast collapsed the front of the two-storey building. He said most of the injured were from nearby houses.

Television footage showed Kurdish women wailing and men running in panic with a burning car behind them. A Kurdish man could be seen carrying a toddler with a bleeding head in his arms.

The footage also showed the four-wheel-drive vehicle that apparently carried the bomb was intact but badly burned. Its chassis was in one piece.

Authorities in Irbil, about 200 miles north of Baghdad, called to residents over loudspeakers to donate blood for the wounded, CNN-Turk said.

Northern Iraq has been the most stable part of the country since the ouster of Saddam Hussein.