Iraqi suicide bomber kills 16

Fourteen police recruits and two policemen have been killed in a suicide bombing in northern Iraq.

An attacker wearing a military uniform detonated an explosive vest near a police recruiting centre at Sinjar, near Mosul in the north of the country.

Ten police recruits and five police officers were wounded, sources said.

Elsewhere, Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has renewed a call to foreign creditors to cancel about £30 billion in debts and asked that compensation payments imposed after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait be scrapped.

Mr al-Maliki made the call at an international conference on Iraq in Stockholm which is assessing progress in a five-year plan to rebuild the war-ravaged country.

"Iraq is not a poor country. It possesses tremendous human and material resources, but the debts of Iraq...which we inherited from the dictator hamper the reconstruction process," he told the conference.

About £33.3 billion of Iraq's £60.1 billion foreign debt has been cancelled, according to US State Department estimates. More than half of the outstanding debt is owed to Gulf Arab states.

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