BAGHDAD, Oct 9: A Spanish diplomat, a US soldier and at least 10 Iraqis died on Thursday in a trio of attacks, showing how frail security still is half a year since US troops occupied Iraq.

US efforts to rebuild Iraq faced diplomatic obstacles too, with doubts raised over the prospect of any UN resolution to map out the country’s political future, and over the point of holding a planned donors’ conference before that is done.

In Baghdad’s bloodiest attack for weeks, police said two suicide bombers crashed an old American car through a police station’s gates, killing two policemen and six civilians and wounding dozens in the blast.

“I saw a car speeding towards the police station. It slammed into another car...there was a huge explosion,” said wounded policeman Achmed Jassim.

“It was definitely a suicide bomb,” another officer said. “We found the head of (one) attacker. It had been blown off his body.”

In another part of the city, Jose Antonio Bernal, an air force sergeant at Spain’s embassy, was chased from his home by three assailants and gunned down, barefoot and in his undershorts.

The Spanish government strongly condemned the killing of the diplomat as a terrorist attack, vowing not to give in to terrorist blackmail and close its Iraqi mission.

“Our embassy will not close, and we will not pull out our officials. We will not give in to terrorist blackmail, which is exactly what the terrorists want,” the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Ramon Gil-Casares, told national radio.

“This is a terrorist attack, which alas has happened a lot in this country recently,” government spokesman Eduardo Zaplana.

The dead Spaniard is Jose Antonio Bernal Gomez, 34, a military attache and intelligence official stationed in Baghdad since 2001, the foreign ministry said.

Bernal was the second Spanish diplomat to die violently in Iraq since the end of major combat operations in the country in early May.

Spain is part of the US-led coalition that is occupying Iraq, and has some 1,250 soldiers in the country under Polish command.

The exact circumstances of Bernal’s death remained unclear.

“The official with the Spanish embassy in Iraq, an intelligence attache with the National Intelligence Center (CNI, the Spanish military intelligence service)... died as a result of gunshots fired by a group of people who Thursday morning went to his home on the outskirts of the Iraqi capital,” the ministry said in a statement.

“The undetermined number of attackers arrived at the home of Mr Bernal in a car bearing foreign license plates, (and) fired several times at the attache of the Spanish embassy when he opened the door,” it said.

But Bernal “was a security specialist and we do not know why he opened the door” without more vigilance, Gil-Casares said.

King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia sent their condolences in a telegram to Bernal’s family.

Northeast of Baghdad, a US soldier died when a rocket propelled grenade hit his convoy — the 92nd soldier to die since US President George Bush declared major combat over on May 1.

Occupying forces and Iraqis who work for them — especially the fledgling police force — have been constant targets for guerillas who Washington says are loyalists of ousted President Saddam Hussein, who is still on the run.

In another grenade attack on Iraqi police late on Wednesday, guerillas killed one policeman and wounded two in the northern oil hub of Kirkuk, the US army said.—Agencies