Baghdad - A blast targeting a police patrol in Iraq's restive Diyala province killed two policemen and injured six people, a security source said Thursday.

The bomb struck a police patrol in Baquba, the capital of Diyala, located some 60 kilometres north of Baghdad, an anonymous security source told Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency.

Diyala, which has witnessed a major military operation in recent weeks, has been a safe haven for anti-US insurgents, mainly the Islamic State of Iraq, also known as al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Diyala has an ethnically mixed population of Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds, leading to ethnic and sectarian clashes. (dpa)