Thirty people were wounded when a suicide car bomber struck an Iraqi army and police compound in the northern city of Mosul on Wednesday, while another car bomb detonated in a crowded area and a third one was defused by the police, a local police source said.
"Our reports said that 15 soldiers, five policemen and 10 civilians were wounded by the suicide car bombing," the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
A suicide bomber drove his explosive rigged car to the entrance of a compound comprising an army base and the al-Zuhour police station in the Qadsiyah neighborhood in northern Mosul, the source said.
In a separate incident, an explosive charge went off at the Dawassa neighborhood in central the city, without causing casualty, the source said, adding that explosive experts defused a car bomb parking in same area at the crowded neighborhood.
The police apparently thwarted a tactic usually used by insurgents to blow up a bomb and to follow it by another explosion when Iraqi security forces arrive at the scene of the first blast, the source said.
Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, has been a stronghold of insurgent groups and al-Qaida fighters in the war-torn country.
Nineveh province has been the scene of major security crackdowns by U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces to uproot the insurgency which erupted shortly after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.