Baghdad - At least 17 people were killed and at least 35 more were wounded when a truck loaded with explosives blew up in a crowded market in eastern Baghdad on Thursday, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said. It was the second bombing in greater Baghdad this week.

An Interior Ministry official, who spoke to the German Press Agency dpa on condition of anonymity, said he feared the number of dead and wounded could rise because of the intensity of the blast, which hit eastern Baghdad's Shalal market at midday.

The attack, the second in greater Baghdad this week, raised fears that the calm that had settled on the capital in recent months could be short-lived.

On Monday, a bomb attack on a market in Abu Ghraib, roughly 25 kilometres west of Baghdad, killed at least 10 people and injured 11 more. That bombing was the second attack on Abu Ghraib in as many weeks: On March 10, a suicide bomber killed at least 28 people, only two kilometres away from the site of Monday's attack.

Thursday's bomb attack came just before Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had been due to arrive in Baghdad, according to reports from Palestinian radio and Iraqi officials Thursday morning.

However on Thursday afternoon Palestinian officials said that Abbas would not be visiting Iraq, although it was not clear whether the visit had been cancelled because of security concerns.

It would have been the first public visit from a Palestinian official to Iraq since 2003, and the latest in a flurry of visits from heads of state and senior officials.

"The rise in diplomatic visits is a reflection of the stability in the country, and that Iraq has moved beyond its worst days," Abbas al-Bayati, a Shiite lawmaker from the ruling United Iraqi Alliance and a member of the Iraqi parliament's defence and security committee, told dpa.

Al-Bayati blamed the recent rise in attacks on detainees recently released from US custody in Iraqi prisons. But, he cautioned, "the rise in attacks does not represent a collapse in the security situation in Baghdad. Baghdad enjoys 90-per-cent stability, but we have some shortcomings that should be dealt with."

On Thursday, a Saudi man suspected of supplying recruits and weapons to the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq surrendered to Saudi authorities, the Saudi News Agency (SPA) reported.

Fahd Rikad Sameer Al-Ruweili, 31, ranks as number 61 out of a list of 85 of the Saudi Interior Ministry's most-wanted suspected terrorists. He had spent the past six years moving between Iraq and Syria, SPA reported.

Al-Ruweili's surrender removed a node of al-Qaeda in Iraq's network, and followed the arrest on Wednesday of 19 suspected insurgents in the northern Iraqi city Mosul. Among those detained was the "minister of finance" for the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organisation encompassing several Sunni insurgent groups including al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The group, which aims to eject foreign troops from Iraq and to establish an Islamic state, in 2007 said it had created "an Islamic administration," including a 10-member cabinet.

But on Thursday, insurgents in western Mosul killed four people and injured one when they detonated a car bomb as an Iraqi police patrol passed by.

That attack was the latest in a near-daily series of attacks in the city. On Wednesday, three children were killed when a bomb planted in a rubbish bin near a school in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul exploded as students were leaving classes in the afternoon.

Iraqi security forces have arrested more than 100 insurgents in Mosul, some 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, since they began an offensive dubbed "Operation New Hope" on February 20. Insurgents have responded with near-daily attacks in and near the city, which remains among Iraq's most dangerous. (dpa)