A bomber has detonated an animal feed truck packed with explosives outside a police station in northern Iraq.
 
The attack has killed at least 30 people and wounded 50, while destroying the police station in the town of Dawr near Tikrit north of Baghdad, officials said on Sunday.
 
 
Lieutenant-Colonel Hur Baz of the Dawr police station said that policemen and prisoners were among those killed when the blast devastated the police department.
 
The station is about 20km south of Tikrit, hometown of Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi president who was executed in December 2006.
 
"Mechanical shovels have been brought in to lever up the wreckage that has fallen, to rescue the dead and wounded. The rescue operation is continuing, and Iraqi and US forces are at the scene," Baz said.

Powerful blast

Dawr's municipal offices and post office were also damaged in the blast.

"The kamikaze parked a truck carrying animal feed against the wall of the station then blew it up. The majority of the building is demolished," Hammad al-Duri said.

A second, smaller roadside bomb exploded further north in Tikrit itself, killing two bystanders, Mazen al-Juburi, Iraqi police captain, said.

Further north near the Syrian border, armed men attacked a bus carrying new recruits from the Iraqi border security force.

The guards had signed up in the border town of Rabiaa and were heading south to their new base when the attackers fired automatic weapons at their minibus, killing all eight men aboard, Jassim Mohammed, a regional official told the AFP news agency.

It was not immediately clear which of Iraq's many armed groups was behind the attacks, but police are regularly targeted by Sunni-led fighters opposed to Iraq's Shia-led government and its US sponsors.

Photo caption

Policeman in Baghdad