Baghdad  - At least 15 people were killed and 30 injured when a man driving a motorcycle detonated explosives outside a police recruitment centre in Baghdad on Sunday morning, police and witnesses told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The attack took place near the Ministry of Oil and Water Resources on the major Baghdad thoroughfare of Palestine Street. Most of those killed were waiting to volunteer for the Iraqi security forces, police and witnesses said.

The blast was audible across eastern Baghdad. Witnesses said they heard shots fired after the blast and saw helicopters and ambulances rushing to the scene.

Victims were taken to the Canadian hospital and to Sadr City hospital, police told dpa.

Sunday's attack was the latest in a recent spike in violence across the country. On Thursday, a car bomb south of Hilla, the capital of the central Iraqi province of Babil, killed at least 10 people and wounded 60 others.

That bombing was quickly followed by a spate of attacks in the ethnically divided northern province of Nineveh, where Iraqi security forces three weeks ago launched a push to pacify the province, dubbed "Operation New Hope."

A woman and her child were injured by stray bullets in a firefight between insurgents and Iraqi policemen in Nineveh's provincial capital of Mosul on Thursday, police there told dpa.

In the Wadi Hajar district west of Mosul, a civilian man and a woman died after a roadside bomb targeting a passing police patrol exploded on Thursday. Two Iraqi policemen were also wounded in that attack, a source in the Mosul police force told dpa, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The attacks followed a series of police raids into what a police source called 'hot' neighborhoods on the west bank of Mosul. Fifty-six suspected insurgents were arrested in those raids and two abductees were freed, police said.

Though Iraqi and US forces have improved security in much of Mosul and Nineveh province, the old city of Mosul, with its maze-like warren of alleys, has remained a hotbed of Sunni insurgents in recent years. dpa