Dozens more were wounded in the triple blasts in the ethnically-divided northern oil hub of Kirkuk which is at the centre of a territorial dispute between Iraq's central government and the north's autonomous Kurdish region.

"We are certain that this terrorist group, Ansar Al-Islam, is behind this attack," Kirkuk province police chief Major General Jamal Taher Bakr told AFP.

"Our security forces will punish that group, because they have targeted all the people of Kirkuk. They are trying to raise sectarianism but they will fail, as they failed before."

In a separate attack in Tal Afar, a town with a large Shiite Turkmen community west of the main northern city of Mosul, a roadside bomb killed two soldiers and wounded as many, an army officer said.

Bakr said the three explosions in Kirkuk, which struck at 10:25 am (0725 GMT), killed eight people and wounded 104.

The police chief said the three blasts included a car bomb driven by a suicide attacker which struck the offices of militiamen loyal to the Kurdistan Democratic Party of regional president Massud Barzani.

He said the second car bomb struck a police patrol in the same west Kirkuk neighbourhood as the first, while a third vehicle packed with explosives detonated nearby, targeting the convoy of a senior police officer.

Police Major Salam Zangana said eight people were killed and 83 wounded in the attacks, adding that a woman, a child and two policemen were among the dead.

Ansar al-Islam is a Sunni militant group created in 2001 by veterans of the war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

It seized a small pocket of territory in then rebel-held Iraqi Kurdistan close to the Iranian border from which it was evicted in the run-up to the US-led invasion of 2003 by coalition special forces and rebel fighters loyal to now Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

Iraq's Kurds have long laid claim to Kirkuk and its oil wealth, citing the province's historical Kurdish majority, but their ambitions are strongly opposed by many Arabs and Turkmen.

US military officials have said the unresolved territorial dispute is one of the biggest threats to Iraq's stability and tensions on the province's borders have led some analysts to dub them the "trigger line."

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