Separate car bombs kill 53 in Iraq

Car bomb blasts in separate parts of Iraq have killed 53 and injured more, according to police.

In the first explosion a car bomb killed 40 people and wounded 70 when it detonated outside a government office in the city of Baquba.

Police said they expected the death toll to rise from the attack in the capital of Diyala province, one of the most volatile parts of Iraq and where US and Iraqi security forces have launched a series of operations against al-Qaeda militants.

The bomb exploded outside the office of the provincial government in Baquba, 40 miles north of Baghdad.

Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda militants have regrouped in provinces north of Baghdad such as Diyala after being pushed out of western Anbar province and the capital by a "surge" of US forces in Iraq during the past year.

Suspicion is likely to fall on al-Qaeda for the Baquba attack given the group's penchant for using car bombs.

The second attack was in the city of Ramadi where a suicide car bomb killed 13 people and wounded 14 others.

Violence had dropped off in Iraq's north in recent weeks, with most attention focused on fighting in the south and in Baghdad between security forces and the Mehdi Army militia of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

But a suicide attack and two car bombs killed 18 people in northern Iraq on Monday.

Among the dead from those attacks were 12 members of Iraq's Kurdish Peshmerga security force, who were in a truck near the Syrian border when a car bomb exploded as they passed by.

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