A car bomb has exploded outside an office used by US soldiers in northern Iraq, killing one Iraqi and wounding six Americans and 41 Iraqis.
The wounded included children from nearby houses and Iraqi Kurdish guards.
Firefighters battled to put out car fires at the scene of the blast in Irbil, the largest city in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.
Staff Sgt Shane Slaughter, US military spokesman in Baghdad, said that the six injured Americans were Department of Defence personnel. He did not say if theywere military or civilian.
He said that the military was investigating the bombing, which happened yesterday at 10.05pm. There were no claims of responsibility.
US soldiers flew to the site by helicopter and cordoned off the area together with local Iraqi Kurdish fighters, reported CNN-Turk, a Turkish subsidiary ofUS-based television channel CNN.
A Turkish reporter at the scene said the blast collapsed the front of the two-storey building. He said most of the injured were from nearby houses.
Television footage showed Kurdish women wailing and men running in panic with a burning car behind them. A Kurdish man could be seen carrying a toddler with ableeding head in his arms.
The footage also showed the four-wheel-drive vehicle that apparently carried the bomb was intact but badly burned. Its chassis was in one piece.
Authorities in Irbil, about 200 miles north of Baghdad, called to residents over loudspeakers to donate blood for the wounded.
Northern Iraq has been the most stable part of the country since Saddam Hussein was ousted.
AP