**A suicide car bomber has killed at least 17 people and injured 80 at a government forensics centre in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, police say.**The attacker apparently tried to drive through a police checkpoint in the Kerrada district leading to the criminal investigations centre.
One report suggests the centre was badly damaged and the death toll, which includes three police, may rise.
Bomb attacks near well-known hotels in the city on Monday killed 36 people.
“The building collapsed soon after the explosion,” an interior ministry official told AFP news agency, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“Dozens of people usually work in the [forensics] institute.”
An Iraqi military spokesman, Maj-Gen Qassim Atta, said the forensics centre had been the target of two bomb attacks in the past.
“At 1045 [0745 GMT] a suicide bomber raced his vehicle towards the institute” and blew it up, the spokesman said.
The attacks on Tuesday and the day before come against a background of improved security and stick out like sore thumbs, the BBC’s Jim Muir reports from Baghdad.
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