MOSUL, June 26: At least 25 people were killed in three suicide attacks in northern Iraq on Sunday amid reports that US officials had met insurgents, including Al Qaeda linked militants, in a bid to stem the violence.

A US soldier was also killed and two wounded in a roadside bombing in the capital, while the military confirmed two more deaths from a suicide attack on a convoy last week.

The trio of blasts in the north all targeted Iraqi police or army bases in and around the region’s main city of Mosul. The third hit a police station attached to the Mosul hospital where most of the casualties from the earlier attacks had been taken.

A man strapped with explosives walked into the Medical City police station and blew himself up, killing four policemen and wounding six, its commander Mohammed Fathi said.

The two earlier blasts targeted the Al-Hadba police station in the city centre and the Al-Kisk army base west of the city.

Fifteen people were killed and seven wounded when the bomber blew himself up among people gathered in a parking lot next to the base, US military spokesman Captain Mark Walter said.

At least five policemen and a civilian were killed and 13 people wounded, half a dozen of them policemen, in the other blast, a police spokesman said. The bomber, who had concealed the explosives beneath a cargo of melons, blew up a pickup against a rear wall of the police station.

In further violence against police, Colonel Riad Abdel Karim, a deputy police chief in Baghdad, was gunned down outside his home, an interior ministry source said.

Four Iraqi police and three US soldiers were wounded in four roadside bombings in and around the northern oil city of Kirkuk, security sources said.

The fresh violence came as the London-based Sunday Times newspaper reported that a US team, including senior military and intelligence officers, had held face-to-face talks with insurgent leaders, including representatives of the Al Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sunna group.—AFP