"At least 19 people were killed and 70 wounded -- five of them grieviously," regional health minister Zerian Abdel Rahman told AFP at the site of the blast. "There were women and children among the casualties."

The blast damaged the front of Arbil's heavily guarded interior ministry and security department.

While insurgent car and truck bombings are an almost daily scourge in central Iraq, this was a rare incident in Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region, which has been spared the bulk of the sectarian violence raging further south.

In May 2005, a suicide bomber killed 46 people in Arbil, but otherwise the three predominantly Kurdish provinces have been largely peaceful.