BAGHDAD, June 13: A suicide car bomber killed up to 12 Iraqis near a US-Iraqi base in Baghdad on Sunday and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant and a university professor in a new spate of assassinations.

The US-led administration has said insurgents may step up attacks before and after the occupation formally ends on June 30 to disrupt the handover and discredit Iraq's new government.

While the new bloodshed seemed to bear out that view, two foreign hostages, a Turk and an Egyptian, were freed after what a mediator called talks with men close to their captors.

Police at the scene of the car bombing said their colleagues had tried to stop a vehicle racing on the wrong side of the road towards an Iraqi military college in southeast Baghdad, where many US soldiers are also based.

Abdul Razzak Kadhem, a senior police officer, said two police cars had intercepted the vehicle, which then exploded. The US military said the blast had killed eight Iraqi civilians and four police, and wounded 13 people.

Two charred bodies could be seen in the burnt wreckage of one police car. All that remained of the bomber's car was a blackened engine in the road. Several civilian vehicles were damaged. Blood stained the driver's seat of a white pick-up.

"One car was blown across the street," said Abdel Hasan al-Jabbar, an off-duty civil defence worker. "The man inside had blood pouring from the top of his head."

US SOLDIER: Insurgents detonated another car bomb outside Taji, north of Baghdad, during an attack on US troops, killing one American soldier and wounding two others. One attacker was killed when troops returned fire, an army spokeswoman said.