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A suicide bomber has killed at least 55 people in a Kurdish restaurant, about 5km north of the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq.
More than 100 people were also wounded in the explosion on Thursday, police said.
Iraqi and US security forces have sealed off the area.
The bombing near the ethnically mixed city came during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.
The restaurant was full of people eating lunch, with more people present than usual due to the four-day holiday, Jamal Tahir, police chief of Kirkuk, said.
"Among the dead are women and children as the bomber blew himself up inside the family section," Ahmad Saleh, an Iraqi journalist who was near the scene of the blast, told Al Jazeera.
"The restaurant is a very popular one and has many foreign workers. Government officials also go there frequently," he said.
Ethnic tensions
Kurdish official said Arab tribal leaders were in the restaurant at the time of the attack, having lunch with members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president.
They were due to attend a meeting with Talabani after the lunch to discuss ways to defuse tensions among Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen in the Kirkuk area.
One official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan was killed, a spokesman said.
The reason behind Thursday's bombing was not immediately clear.
Kirkuk, the centre of Iraq's northern oil fields, has seen fewer attacks than other regions in Iraq but remains the focus of years of competition and political wrangling among ethnic groups, including Arabs and Kurds, with rival claims to the city.
Both groups want control Kirkuk, the Kurds as part of a breakaway territory with the surrounding Tamim province and their own self-ruled region in northern Iraq.
The Abdullah restaurant where the attack occurred is on the main road from Irbil to Kirkuk and is popular with Kurdish officials moving to and from the nearby Kurdish region.
It is affiliated with another Kurdish restaurant of the same name which was attacked by a car bomb in 2007. Six people died due to that blast.
PHOTO CAPTION
A map locating the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq
Al-Jazeera
