Up to 150 people are feared to have been killed by a lorry bomb in a crowded market in the northern Iraqi village of Amirli.

Many homes in the small community were destroyed when a suicide bomber detonated a powerful bomb on a lorry loaded with bricks, security and administration officials said on Saturday.

Emergency workers in northern Iraq told Al Jazeera the death toll could reach as high as 150.

Lieutenant colonel Saman Hamid, security forces commander in nearby Tuz Khurmatu, told the AFP news agency, "105 Iraqis were killed and five are missing ... there are more than 250 wounded.

The casualty toll was confirmed by Dr Wissam Abdullah, the director of a local hospital.

Homes destroyed

Hamad Rasheed, a local civilian administrator, said, "The security reports that I have received from the scene confirmed that 115 were killed and five are missing and around five more collected as loose flesh.

Rasheed said: "Some 40 homes, 20 shops and 10 vehicles were destroyed.

"The corpses were under the debris of the collapsed buildings. Some were burnt and others were torn apart.

"This is a big disaster for the town, all of the casualties were civilians," he added.

Abdullah said the dead and wounded had been taken to an emergency room at his hospital in Tuz Khurmatu, to two hospitals in Kirkuk, the provincial capital, and two more as far away as the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.

Earlier reports had put the death toll at about 20 people.

It was the second attack on a village in the north of the country in the last 24 hours.

Late on Friday a suicide car bomber killed 22 people and wounded 17 others when he drove his vehicle into a group of Shia Kurds near Iraq's border with Iran.

The victims were returning from a funeral, a local official said.

In another attack, six people were killed, including five Iraqi soldiers, when a car bomb was driven into a military checkpoint in east Baghdad, an army spokesman said. The attack also wounded 24 people, including 18 soldiers.

US soldiers killed

Meanwhile, the US military announced the deaths of six troops in the past three days, mostly victims of roadside bombs in Baghdad.

Three soldiers were killed by the devices in Baghdad on Friday and another on Saturday. Two Marines were killed in combat in Anbar province, the US military said.

So far this month 20 soldiers have been killed, half of them in Baghdad.

Overnight, a mortar killed seven members of a family in Baghdad as they slept on their roof, police said.

Constant power outages often force Iraqis to sleep on the roof of their homes to try and escape sweltering summer temperatures inside.

Police said the mortar bomb that killed seven family members in the mostly Sunni neighborhood of Fadhil in central Baghdad also wounded two neighbors.

PHOTO CAPTION

Iraqis bring a wounded man in a hospital in the city of Kirkuk – 7/7/07