BAGHDAD, March 10: A suicide bomber blew himself up among U.S. soldiers in central Baghdad on Monday, killing five and wounding three in the worst single attack on US forces in the Iraqi capital in nearly a year.

The US military said in a statement that the blast, which also wounded an Iraqi interpreter, hit the soldiers while they were on foot patrol. Iraqi police said at least nine Iraqis were wounded.

The military blamed the attack on a suicide bomber. Police, citing witness accounts, said the soldiers had been walking in a main street in the upscale Mansour district when a man wearing an explosives vest walked up to them and blew himself up.

The attack was a reminder that while violence is sharply down in the capital since thousands of US and Iraqi soldiers set up patrol bases in neighbourhoods to curb sectarian violence, it is still far from safe.

Nearly 70 people were killed in a double bombing in Baghdad’s central Karrada district last Thursday in attack that the US military blamed on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda.

“We remain resolute in our resolve to protect the people of Iraq and kill or capture those who would bring them harm,”Colonel Allen Batschelet, chief of staff of US forces in Baghdad, said in a statement after Monday’s attack.

The statement said four soldiers were killed in the blast and one died later of wounds.

A police official at Baghdad’s Yarmouk hospital said nine wounded Iraqis had been admitted, including a policeman. “They said a suicide bomber, a man, blew himself up among American soldiers,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A Reuters cameraman said US forces sealed off the scene of blast, which occurred outside a large computer store.

WOMAN BOMBER: Monday’s deaths took to at least 3,979 the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003. Seven soldiers have died so far this month, compared to 81 for the whole of March 2007.

The worst previous single attack on US soldiers in Baghdad was in June, when five soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb attack on their patrol.

Some 2,000 US soldiers are being withdrawn from Baghdad under a Pentagon plan to pull out five brigades from Iraq by July 31. A second brigade in the capital is also due to be withdrawn.

The US military says the withdrawal timetable will not be affected by last week’s bombing. They are part of the 30,000 extra troops sent to Iraq last year which the US administration said was meant to give the Iraqi government time to reach a political accommodation with its opponents.

In other violence on Monday, a female suicide bomber killed a prominent Sunni Arab tribal chief who headed a neighbourhood security unit and three others in the volatile Iraqi province of Diyala on Monday, police said.

The neighbourhood units have been credited by the United States for sharp falls in violence across Iraq.

Police said the woman went to the home of Thaer Saggban al-Karkhi in Kanaan, southeast of the provincial capital Baquba, knocked on the door and told guards she needed to speak to him.

When Karkhi came to the door she detonated a vest packed with explosives she was wearing hidden underneath her robes, police said. Karkhi’s niece was among the dead and two of his bodyguards were wounded.

Al Qaeda has increasingly used women wearing suicide vests to carry out strikes after tighter security and protective concrete blast walls made car bombings more difficult.

US military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith said on Sunday that a recent increase in bombings was not the start of a wider trend and that violence was down overall.—Reuters