BAGHDAD, April 10: A woman suicide bomber killed 17 police recruits outside an Iraqi police station northeast of Baghdad on Tuesday in the first major attack on volunteers for local security forces this year.

A guard at the station and police officials said the woman was wearing an Islamic gown and had been strapped with a belt filled with explosives.

The attack wounded 33 people in the majority Sunni Muslim town of Muqdadiya, 90 km from the capital.

“The recruits were bringing along their files and they were intending to line up when all of a sudden there was a big explosion,” the guard said.

The woman had been acting suspiciously as she walked among the dozens of recruits, he added.

In central Baghdad, witnesses reported fierce clashes between US and Iraqi forces and gunmen in the Fadhil district of the capital, a Sunni insurgent stronghold. Residents said US helicopters fired on buildings where gunmen had holed up.

The US military said there was an ongoing operation in the area and an Apache attack helicopter had been hit by small arms fire in the area. It returned to base.

Four US soldiers were killed on Monday, putting April on course to be the deadliest for troops this year as more American and Iraqi forces deploy under a two-month-old security plan.

The latest deaths bring to about 45 the number of US troops killed in Iraq this month, half of them in the Baghdad area. Between 80 and 85 soldiers were killed in each of the first three months of the year, according to military figures.

US President George W. Bush is sending 30,000 additional American soldiers to Iraq to bolster an offensive against militants in Baghdad that many regard as a last-ditch attempt to halt Iraq’s spiral into all-out sectarian war.

A key element of Operation Imposing Law is getting more US troops on the streets and assigned to dozens of joint security stations with Iraqi forces across the capital.

Three of the US soldiers were killed and another was wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near their patrol in Baghdad on Monday. Another was killed in volatile western Anbar province, heart of the Sunni Arab insurgency.—Reuters