Iraqi police have said that at least 17 people were killed by a suicide bomber who drove his car into a queue of day labourers waiting to be hired in the mainly Shia town of Hilla, south of Baghdad.

Police said 49 people were also wounded in the blast, which came against a backdrop of continuing sectarian fighting between Shia and Sunnis that has killed thousands.

The workers were attacked in a yard where they usually gathered to be hired, police said.

Ali Mohammed told Reuters as he lay in a local hospital, his left thigh bandaged: "I was standing with other labourers when the minibus came and the driver asked for labourers. Everybody ran towards him and then he exploded his car.

Iraqi police

Hilla, close to the site of ancient Babylon, is surrounded by Sunni rural areas that are havens for those opposed to US-led forces and al-Qaeda bombers.

In separate incidents, an interior ministry source said that a roadside bomb wounded six people in Baghdad's southern Saidiya district.

And in Mosul, Lieutenant-Colonel Mohammed Ganim from the Facility Protection Services (FPS) was killed along with his driver in a drive-by shooting.

It has seen some of the deadliest bomb attacks over the past two years, including the bloodiest single blast in Iraq, when 125 people, many of them police recruits, were killed by a car bomber in February 2005.

In August, a bomb apparently left on a parked bicycle hit a crowd of Iraqi men outside an army recruiting office killing 12 people.

Sunday's blast followed the killing of a prominent Shia politician on Saturday in what looked like a sectarian assassination.

Ali al-Adhadh, of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), was shot dead with his wife as he drove in mainly Sunni west Baghdad.

Sunni Arabs were enraged last week after an arrest warrant was issued for leading Iraqi Sunni scholar Harith al-Dari on charges of inciting terrorism, accusing the Shia-led government of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki sectarianism.

Al-Maliki's six-month-old national unity government has been unable to stop the fighting in Iraq but is coming under growing US pressure to show some progress in reaching a political accommodation with Sunnis and reining in militias blamed for much of the bloodshed.

PHOTO CAPTION

The coffins of the bakery workers who were killed by gunmen lie on top of two vehicles for funerals in Baghdad November 16, 2006. (Reuters)