KIRKUK, Iraq (Reuters):

A suicide truck bomb killed 12 people and wounded around 150 others in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk yesterday in the latest attack by insurgents using explosives-laden trucks.

Many of the victims were women and children at a nearby school, police said.

Insurgents have hit a string of northern Iraqi towns in the past 10 days in bombings that have killed hundreds of people. Officials have blamed the attacks on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda.

In other violence, the bodies of 19 men from a Shi'ite village kidnapped by gunmen at a fake checkpoint north of Baghdad were found on Monday, police said. All had been shot in the head in one of the biggest kidnappings in months.

U.S. commanders say insurgents are shifting the focus of their attacks outside Baghdad because of a nearly seven-week-old crackdown in the capital. The U.S.-Iraqi offensive is seen as a final attempt to halt Iraq's plunge into sectarian civil war.

Blast

Police said the attacker in Kirkuk rammed his vehicle into the main gate of the police criminal investigation department and detonated the bomb, triggering a blast that echoed across the ethnically-mixed city. The building was partially destroyed.

"I was preparing lunch for my children when the explosion happened. I thought the house was going to collapse," said one woman, holding her screaming daughter and son near the scene.

Police and hospital officials put the death toll at 12.

A Reuters reporter at the scene saw a fireman holding the bloodied body of a young child. It was not clear whether the child was dead or alive.

Last Tuesday a truck bomb in the northern town of Tal Afar killed 152 people, making it the deadliest single insurgent attack of the four-year-old war.