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BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber in police uniform killed a top police official in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Thursday as he toured the site of a blast a day earlier that killed 36 people and wounded scores, police said.
Rescuers were still digging through the rubble of Wednesday's explosion in search of survivors when the attacker blew up next to Nineveh province police director Brigadier-General Salih Mohammed Hasan Atiya al-Jubouri, the US military and Iraqi officials said.
Nineveh provincial council chief Hisham al-Hamdani said 169 people had also been wounded in Wednesday's blast.
US and Iraqi military officials said the suicide bomber walked up to Jubouri as he toured the site and detonated a vest packed with explosives. He died of his wounds as he was being rushed for emergency treatment.
Iraqi police had earlier incorrectly identified the senior police official killed as Brigadier-General Salih Mohammed Hasan, police chief in the Nineveh provincial capital Mosul.
The US military said two Iraqi police were also killed in Thursday's blast. Police said an Iraqi journalist working for the Chinese state news agency Xinhua was among five others wounded, although no more information was immediately available.
The US military said a US soldier was also wounded.
US commanders have identified Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, as al Qaeda's last major urban stronghold in Iraq after its fighters were driven out of western Anbar province and from around Baghdad during security crackdowns last year.
Mosul officials imposed an indefinite curfew after Wednesday's massive blast, blamed by US military commanders on al Qaeda, in northern Iraq's largest city.
Iraqi security officials had feared the death toll from that blast would rise as rescuers picked through rubble in the ethnically and religiously mixed city 390km north of Baghdad.
Women and children were among the victims, officials said. Heavy equipment was being used to clear the debris and the US military has sent medical teams to Mosul to help treat the scores of wounded.
The explosion, in an unoccupied, three-storey house used by militants to store weapons and tonnes of explosives, destroyed or badly damaged 35 nearby homes.
"This is a stark example of al Qaeda's disregard for the citizens of Iraq," Major-General Mark Hertling, commander of US forces in northern Iraq, said in a statement.
"It also highlights their willingness to risk the lives of innocent civilians by storing weapons in civilian homes."
Hertling said on Wednesday it appeared that Iraqi soldiers had triggered a massive secondary explosion when they detonated a roadside bomb they found near the building.
He said explosives experts at the scene estimated 15 tonnes of ordnance had been hidden there.
Witnesses described the blast, which sent a huge plume of smoke rising above Mosul, as one of the biggest explosions ever heard in the city.
US and Iraqi forces this year have launched offensives in Nineveh and other northern provinces against Sunni Islamist al Qaeda fighters who are most often blamed for large-scale bombings in Iraq.
Despite such bombings in the north, violence has fallen sharply across the country, with overall attacks down by 60 per cent since last June.
US and Iraqi officials attribute the decline in violence to the deployment of an extra 30,000 US troops and the growing use of mainly Sunni Arab neighbourhood police units in areas where local citizens have turned against al Qaeda.
In other violence on Thursday, two policemen were killed and three others wounded by a roadside bomb in central Baghdad's Karrada district, police said.
- REUTERS
