By Xinhua
Mosul, Iraq : Up to five policemen were killed and 33 people injured in the Friday morning suicide car bomb attack on a police station in the city of Mosul, the capital of the northern Nineveh province, a provincial police source said.
“The death toll rose to five policemen and 33 people were wounded, most of them were policemen,” Brigadier Khalid Abdul Sattar, spokesman of Nineveh’s police operations office told Xinhua.
The attack took place at about 7 a.m. (0400 GMT) when a suicide bomber rammed his explosive-laden car into the Waqqass police station in central the city and blew it up, Sattar said.
The powerful blast destroyed parts of the police station’s building, along with several number of nearby houses and shops, he said.
Earlier, the source put the toll at four policemen killed and 17 people wounded, including ten policemen.
Iraqi security forces immediately cordoned off the area to secure the scene, while ambulances and rescue teams were evacuating casualties to the city hospitals, he added.
Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, has been the hot bed of insurgency since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Nineveh province has recently been a focus of a major offensive with the aim of uprooting the al-Qaida militants from their last stronghold in the province where they were believed to be regrouped after being defeated in Baghdad and other Iraqi provinces.