Damascus  - A car bomb in the Syrian capital Damascus early Saturday killed at least 17 civilians and wounded 14 in an attack believed to be aimed at intelligence personnel.

The 200-kilo bomb went off near the busy Sayyida Zainab district at 8:45 am (0545 GMT). The bomb, which exploded near a secret service facility, was believed to be targeting a senior intelligence official who was in the building at the time, Lebanese media reported.

There were no immediate reports whether this person was killed or injured.

Witnesses in the area said some of the dead were intelligence men in plain clothes. However, the Syrian authorities said all the victims were civilians.

Anti-terrorism experts were immediately at the scene and closed all roads to the area. Houses in the area were searched for suspects.

The roads were reopened later and normal movement resumed.

"This is a cowardly act," Syrian Interior Minister Colonel Bassam Abdel Majid told Syrian television.

The powerful blast was felt in other neighbourhoods with one witness telling Syrian television it felt like an earthquake.

"The fact that Saturday was a holiday in Syria helped in reducing the number of casualties in an area that is busy with pedestrians and schools," said another witness.

A famous Shiite shrine, the Sayyida Zainab mosque, is located in the area and is frequented by pilgrims.

A Syrian source near the scene told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that some of the wounded were Iranians. Iranians are frequent visitors to the shrine dedicated to a granddaughter of the Prophet Mohammed.

Hassan Abdel Azim, spokesman for the opposition reformist group the Damascus Declaration, told al-Jazeera TV that the Syrian opposition condemned the explosion and regarded it as "an act of terrorism."

He said that Damascus Declaration and the democratic opposition in Syria rejected any act of violence and were working for peaceful and stable democratic change in the country.

Abdel Azim called on the country's regime to open up to Syrian society so as "to remove any tensions and to achieve national unity."

The last major bombing in Damascus occurred in February, when Imad Mughniyah - a commander in the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah - was killed. The Lebanese militant had been wanted by the United States on charges of terrorism.

The US and Israel accuse Syria of supporting Hezbollah and radical Palestinian groups.

In contrast to its neighbours Lebanon and Iraq, Syria with its extensive secret service network is rarely the victim of bomb attacks.

Critics of President Bashar al-Assad have alleged after previous attacks that the secret service itself had orchestrated them in order to give the impression that Syria too was threatened by Islamic extremism.

In recent weeks, the Iraqi government repeatedly stressed that Syria had changed its policies and was now making efforts to prevent the movement of terrorists into Iraq across the countries' common border. (dpa)