ARBIL, Iraq - Forty-six people were killed and 94 injured Wednesday when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a group of police recruits in the Kurdish city of Arbil in northern Iraq.
Twelve other people, including a foreign private security guard, were killed in other violence in Baghdad and north of the capital, while the US military also announced that two of its troops had been killed Tuesday.
The Arbil bombing, one of the deadliest since the January 30 election, came a day after the new government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari was sworn in.
"Following the death of one of the wounded, the death toll now stands at 46 killed and 94 wounded," Nawzad Hadi, governor of Arbil province, said.
"We will continue fighting terrorists until we root them out. They will not scare us," he said.
Scenes of chaos filled the streets as ambulances were still evacuating the dead and injured from the compound, which was also an office for the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), one of the two main Kurdish factions.
A doctor from the Ruz Gari hospital, Arbil's largest, stepped out in front of the crowd and read the names of 39 victims - all of them police recruits - and added that six bodies had not yet been identified.
Sunni-backed insurgents have stepped up their attacks since Jaafari announced a partial cabinet line-up on April 28, killing more than 200 people in less than a week.
Arbil, 350 kilometres (210 miles) north of Baghdad, is the fiefdom of Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), one of the two main Kurdish factions in Iraq.
The targeted recruitment centre was also major office for the KDP in Arbil. On Sunday, a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden ambulance into a funeral for a KDP official in the northern town of Tall Afar, killing 25 and wounding scores.
The Sunni Arab insurgency's weapon of choice has been the car bomb in recent months, but suicide bombers mingling with aspiring soldiers before blowing themselves up to cause maximum damage is a technique which has been used before against heavily-guarded recruitment centres.
Double suicide bombings in Arbil killed more than 100 people in January 2004, in what was then the deadliest attack since the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
A foreign security guard was killed and one of his colleagues wounded Wednesday when their convoy was ambushed by insurgents near the town of Baiji, 200 kilometres (120 miles) north of Baghdad, police lieutenant colonel Mizhir Khalaf told AFP.
The victim's nationality was not immediately known.
Two Kurds were killed in separate drive-by shooting attacks in the northern oil city of Kirkuk, police said without providing more details on the identity of the victims.
West of the city, the police said it had captured three members of Al-Qaeda frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network.
Two Iraqi civilians working with the US military and two Iraqi soldiers were killed in separate attacks in the Tikrit area north of Baghdad, an army officer said.
In Dhuluiyah, another Sunni rebel stronghold north of the capital, an Iraqi army lieutenant was gunned down by attackers as he left a military base, captain Assad Saddad said.
In the town of Sharqat, further north, an Iraqi soldier was killed and 10 others wounded when gunmen attacked a highway checkpoint, army captain Naji al-Juburi said.
In the same town, the bullet-riddled bodies of two Iraqi contractors who were working with the US military and had been kidnapped two days earlier, police said.
And violence continued to rage in Baghdad, where insurgents have carried out a string of deadly car bomb attacks in recent days.
Two Iraqi civilians were killed in vehicles by US troops when they came too close to a US military convoy in Baghdad's Yarmuk district, an interior ministry official said.
An Iraqi soldier was also killed by unknown gunmen in a western neighbourhood, the same source said.
The US military announced that two of its soldiers were killed in roadside bomb attack in Baghdad on Tuesday, bringing to 1,583 the number of US troops who have died in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.
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