A suicide bomber blew up a fuel truck near a Baghdad police station yesterday, killing at least nine people, wounding 62 and destroying cars and buildings.

The Baghdad attack was the latest of at least five suicide bombings over the past week aimed at Iraqi police, National Guard or senior members of Iraq's new government which have killed more than 35 Iraqis in a seemingly accelerated campaign.

Iraq's Health Ministry said it had so far recorded nine dead and 62 wounded but expected its death toll to rise. It said bodies were still being brought to hospitals and boxes of remains had yet to be sifted through.

At the scene of the blast, US Army Lieutenant Colonel Bill Salter said between 10 and 15 people had been killed in an attack he said was probably carried out by a suicide bomber.

"We believe it was possibly a fuel-truck type vehicle," Mr Salter told reporters. Witnesses said they saw a fuel tanker racing towards the police station moments before the explosion.

Reuters Television pictures showed flames still licking the wreckage of burnt-out cars an hour after the blast, and smoke rising from smouldering buildings. Bystanders gathered up the body parts of the dead, filling several boxes with remains.

In the latest assassination of senior bureaucrats, Defence Ministry official Issam Jassem Qassim was shot dead outside his home by three gunmen late on Sunday, a ministry spokesman said, a day after a failed attempt on the life of Iraq's justice minister which killed five bodyguards.

The suicide bomb was detonated shortly after 8 a.m. (0400 GMT), as people were arriving at work. Car workshops across the road from the police station bore the brunt of the blast, witnesses said, and several people working there were killed.

"Those who were standing in the open were killed. Those who saw it were killed," said car workshop worker Laith Abdel Karim.

It was the latest in a series of suicide attacks in recent days. A car bomb outside the headquarters of the US military and the Iraqi interim government in Baghdad last week killed 11 people and another outside an Iraqi National Guard garrison 200 kilometres northwest of Baghdad killed 10.

A suicide bomber tried to assassinate Iraq's justice minister on Saturday and the governor of the northern Nineveh province was assassinated in an attack on his convoy last week.

Insurgents often target the police and the National Guard, accusing them of collaborating with the US military. One National Guardsman at the scene of yesterday's bombing was angered by that charge.

"They say we collaborate with the coalition. We don't collaborate, we just protect our nation. We protect the land of Iraqis," Amer Shaker Mehdi said.