A suicide car bomber killed five policemen today outside a hospital where victims of two church bombings earlier in the night were being treated, police said.
Earlier at least three people were killed and 40 injured in two car bomb explosions outside the two churches in central Baghdad, hospital officials said.
The victims from the church bombings were taken to Yarmouk hospital, where a suicide bomber later drove into four police cars parked outside the entrance. A wave of bombings hit the Iraqi capital throughout today as US forces launched an all-out assault to capture the rebel-held city of Falluja, west of Baghdad.
The blast in the capital's Dora district destroyed the outer wall of St Bahnam's Church and set the house next door ablaze, witnesses said.
Police said a car bomb had exploded outside the church but witnesses said it appeared explosives were planted nearby.
Meanwhile
a suicide bomber blew up his red Opel car near a US convoy on Baghdad's main airport road today and
killed at least three people, witnesses said.
A Reuters photographer saw US soldiers taking three bodies from a four-wheel-drive vehicle wrecked in the blast and loading them on stretchers into a military ambulance.
A group led by al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said in an Internet statement that it had carried out the attack.
"A lion from the martyrs battalion rammed into a convoy of CIA cars . . .
on the Baghdad airport road this morning," al-Qaeda Organisation of Holy War in Iraq said in the posting on a website used by Islamists. Its authenticity could not be verified.
A police source said earlier that at least two Iraqis had been killed, one of them a woman.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said he could give no casualty toll because US troops had sealed off the area after the attack at 10 a.m. (local time).
A soldier from Britain's Black Watch battle group was killed and two others wounded tonight in a roadside bomb explosion in central Iraq, the Ministry of Defence said.
The soldiers were travelling in a Warrior armoured vehicle north of their Camp Dogwood base, south of Baghdad, when they were caught in an explosion.