MOSUL, March 27: A suicide bomber tricked soldiers into believing he was bringing food supplies to a northern Iraqi town on Tuesday in the deadliest of a spate of attacks killing nearly 80 people nationwide.

The blast ripped through Tal Afar, unleashing carnage and destroying buildings after a crowd of hungry Iraqis surrounded the vehicle that residents and soldiers believed was a supply convoy following a week of food shortages.

Just moments after being waved into the area by Iraqi soldiers, the bomber detonated his cargo of flour and explosives, killing and wounding those around just three days after a marketplace suicide attack in the same town.

An Iraqi army officer said 55 people had been killed and at least 125 wounded in the truck bombing and a separate car bombing in the same town of some 200,000 people, unable to specify a separate toll breakdown.

The US military, which scrambled helicopters to evacuate the wounded to US medical facilities, said several buildings collapsed in the explosion that blasted a 15-metre-diametre crater out of the ground.

Tuesday’s bombings raised further concerns about escalating insecurity in the mixed Shia-Sunni town after US President George W. Bush last year held it up as a model for coalition efforts to create a stable Iraq.

The Tal Afar attacks came just hours after US forces in Iraq said they had arrested two leaders of a network suspected of killing about 900 civilians and wounding nearly 2,000 others in a campaign of car bombings.

Haytham Kazim Abdallah al-Shimari and Haydar Rashid Nasir al-Shammari al-Jafar were detained separately on March 21 in the north Baghdad Sunni rebel bastion of Adhamiyah, the US military said.

Tuesday’s truck bomber mimicked tactics deployed in the south Baghdad insurgent stronghold of Dura last Saturday when a bomber disguised as a merchant bringing building supplies to a police station killed 20 people.

The bombings gave credence to US statements that while a new security crackdown has seen a decline in execution-style killings, a hallmark of Shia militias, the big car bombs associated with Sunni militants have carried on.

Elsewhere, bombings and mortar and small-arms fire killed another 23 Iraqis.

Two mortar rounds slammed into the Abu Chir district of Dura, where Iraqi and US forces have been concentrated under the new security crackdown.

Two children, a man and a woman were killed, while another 14 people were wounded.

Gunmen opened fire in the capital’s biggest market killing two civilians and wounding seven, a security official said.

A suicide bomber who blew up a vehicle near Baghdad’s Mustansiriyah University killed one policeman and wounded three. College campuses have become a frequent target for insurgent bombings.

South of Baghdad, four people died in Iskandiriyah when unidentified gunmen opened fire on a Sunni funeral cortege, army officer Mohammed al-Tahi said.

In the northern oil hub of Kirkuk, gunmen broke into the home of two elderly Armenian women and shot the two longtime residents of the city, police Captain Imad Jassim said.

One of the women was aged 80 and the other in her 60s, the officer said.

Mass emigration has seen Iraq’s Christian communities slump to just 700,000 people among a total population of 27 million.—AFP