At least 16 people have been killed and another 45 wounded in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, in a double bomb attack.
Iraqi officials said a teenage suicide bomber blew himself up as police rushed to respond to a prior car bomb blast on Monday.
The two blasts occurred within minutes of each other on Palestine Street outside the heavily fortified police academy in eastern Baghdad, where recruits had gathered, according to police and witnesses.
Those killed included five policemen and 11 recruits, while the 46 wounded included 11 policemen and 35 recruits, according to police and hospital officials.
Bloodied police uniforms were scattered with the crumpled metal hulk of the car bomb on the charred street in the aftermath of the bombing, footage from the Associated Press Television News showed.
Mosul bombing
Elsewhere in the country on Monday, 15 people were killed and about 30 wounded in a suicide car bombing against a joint US-Iraqi patrol in the centre of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, police said.
"A suicide bomber blew his car up in the path of a joint patrol between Iraqi police and the American military in Mosul al-Jadida," a police officer at the scene was reported by the AFP news agency as saying.
The interior minister said the majority of the victims were policemen.
The latest bombings follow the Iraqi parliament approval of a security pact with the US that lets American forces remain in Iraq for three more years.
PHOTO CAPTION
Iraqi soldiers man a checkpoint in Baghdad's Palestine Street earlier this year.
Al-Jazeera