A suicide bomber blew himself up outside an army recruitment centre in the northern Iraqi town of Rabiah, near the Syrian border, killing 25 people and wounding 35, police said.

"An initial toll put the number of those killed at 25 and the number of those wounded at 35," police General Said al-Juburi said from Mosul.

The victims were young men waiting to sign up to join the army, he said.

The al-Qaida group in Iraq said in an Internet statement it carried out the attack. It was not possible to verify the claim.

The US military put the death toll at 20, with another 25 injured.

In a statement, a US military spokesman for Task Force Freedom, based in Mosul, the country's third largest city, said the bomber had detonated himself outside an Iraqi police station in Rabiah.

Insurgents have repeatedly attacked army recruitment centres across the country as thousands of young men, most of them unemployed, seek to join. Some 1,000 to 1,400 recruits are joining the new army every month, US officials said.

The attack took place at 12:30 pm local time as the suicide bomber mixed with the recruits, Juburi said.

Some of those most seriously wounded were rushed to the hospital in Mosul, some 370 kilometres north of Baghdad, according to medical sources.

Officials at Mosul's Jumhuri Hospital said two bodies and 32 of the wounded were brought to the hospital Friday afternoon. The hospital official, who declined to give his name, added that six ambulances were heading to the site to transport more casualties.

The attack occurred as the United States placed new urgency on the training of Iraqi soldiers and police in hopes they can assume greater security responsibility so that US and other foreign troops can begin going home next year.

A recently released US report said that Iraqi security forces have suffered from inadequate vetting processes, and are highly vulnerable to infiltration by insurgents.

"I was waiting in the court in the middle of the recruitment centre with four of my friends when there was a blast behind us," said Raduane Muayyad, one of the survivors, who was hit with shrapnel in his back and legs.

Rabiah's residents are largely Sunni Arab, formerly privileged during the rule of ousted leader Saddam Hussein and now blamed for being the backbone of the insurgency against the Iraqi Government and US forces in Iraq.

Source: China Daily