Sixty-eight people died and 58 were wounded in a car-bomb attack on a police station in Baquba in northern Iraq. The blast ripped through a recruitment line where hopeful Iraqis were lining up for work. The carnage, one of the worst since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, came as the embattled interim Iraqi government marked one month in office. Ever increasing violence resulted in the deaths of 12 people in clashes and attacks around the country.

In Baquba, dozens of maimed bodies were strewn outside the police post, while at least a dozen corpses were lined up outside the town's morgue, already crammed to overflowing. Confirming that a suicide bomber triggered the huge explosion, General Walid Khaled Abdel Salam accused a group loyal to Abu Mussab Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's suspected chief in Iraq, of masterminding the attack. "They carried out this horrible act to scare off the new recruits," he said. The Sunni Muslim belt north and west of the capital has been an almost daily scene of attacks on symbols of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's caretaker government.

In Cairo, Powell vowed the Baquba bombing would not "deter us [from] our goal." He later said that he still believed Iraq's first post-Saddam elections, due to take place early next year, were "doable." After talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and other top officials, he flew to Saudi Arabia, his second stop on a four-country tour of the Middle East. On arrival in Jeddah, Powell held talks with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to discuss regional stability and terrorism.

South of the Baghdad, a region largely peaceful since an uprising by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr ended earlier this year, a joint Iraqi-US raid on militants left 35 insurgents and seven Iraqi soldiers dead. A US spokesman said the dead insurgents crossed illegally into Iraq from Iran only a few days before.

West of Fallujah, four Iraqi policemen were killed and one was wounded when a homemade bomb targeted a joint US-Iraqi convoy. In Baghdad, two people were killed, including a 13-year-old child, when a projectile landed in a central residential district. In the northern oil center of Kirkuk, two Iraqis suspected of trying to bomb an oil pipeline were shot dead and a policeman was killed on his way home.

Two US soldiers were killed in attacks in western Iraq, where insurgents forced down two helicopters, the US military said. In another clash, one insurgent was killed and 11 US troops wounded when their military camp was attacked.

The hostage crisis (some 20 people are being held captive by groups demanding US troops leave Iraq) continued Wednesday when gunmen stormed the home of the governor of Iraq's Anbar province in Ramadi, and snatched three of his sons, one of them a teenager. They were abducted before gunmen torched the building while Governor Abdul Karim Burghis Rawi was at work.

The Iraqi prisoner torture scandal, which had faded from headlines in recent weeks, was the subject of a chilling court hearing in London Wednesday, with one detainee charging that British troops had doused prisoners in cold water and kickboxed them against a wall. Kifah Taha Mutari's graphic allegations were made at the start of a hearing in London to determine whether the alleged deaths of Iraqi civilians at the hands of British troops in southern Iraq should be investigated. "Soldiers took turns abusing us," Mutari said in a statement read by his lawyer. "One terrible game the soldiers played involved kickboxing. The soldiers would surround us and compete as to who could kickbox one of us furthest. The idea was to try and make us crash into the wall."

The Military Police have opened a total of 75 investigations into claims that British troops killed, injured or abused Iraqi civilians. Of these, 37 were dismissed, 30 remain in progress and eight are awaiting conclusions.