An Iraqi police official said the suicide attacker struck the outpost at midday in the desert north of Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad. At least 16 people were injured in the explosion, the official said.
Witnesses said the truck exploded near the front gate of the post, erupting into a huge fireball and setting cars and trucks ablaze.
“It is like an earthquake took place,’’ a police officer said.
He said the blast also threw cars into the air and overturned trucks.
In a separate attack, at least three Iraqi soldiers were killed in a double roadside bombing in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Ghazaliyah in western Baghdad, said another police official. Fifteen others, including 11 civilians, were wounded, he said.
A bomb attached to a bus exploded in mostly Shi’ite southern Iraq, killing at least six, according to a police official.
In northern Iraq, a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol in Mosul killed two officers and wounded two, another police official said. The police officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
The news came as the US military freed another 35 members of a group linked to the abduction of five British citizens from Iraq’s Finance Ministry in 2007, a representative for the faction said. The prisoner release means nearly 100 members of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or League of the Righteous, have left US custody since late last week. About 250 have been freed since July as talks intensify over the fate of the sole British hostage believed to be still alive.
An envoy for the militant group, Salam al-Maliki, said Asaib Ahl al-Haq is seeking the release of its leader, Sheikh Qais al-Khazali. But negotiations are complicated by efforts to seek guarantees to free Peter Moore, the remaining hostage.
A group of armed men seized Moore, a computer expert working for a US-based consultancy firm, and his four bodyguards from the Finance Ministry in May 2007. The bodies of at least three of the hostages have been identified.
