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Twin blasts at Kurdish party office in north Iraq kill 24


    KIRKUK Iraq (Reuters) - At least 24 people were killed in a double bombing on the offices of a Kurdish political party in the northern Iraqi town of Tuz Khurmato, local officials and medical workers said.

    A lorry packed with explosives rammed into the barricade surrounding the local headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and when people gathered to help the wounded, a second car bomb blew up in their midst.

    The blasts destroyed many houses nearby and the sources said more bodies were likely to be found beneath the debris.

    Tuz Khurmato is around 170 km (100 miles) north of the capital Baghdad and lies in territory which both the central government and the autonomous Kurdistan region claim as theirs. 

    The attack came just one day after 18 people were killed in two blasts that also targeted PUK offices in the ethnically mixed province of Diyala. The Sunni militant Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed responsibility for that attack.

    (Reporting by Mustafa Mahmoud in Kirkuk and Ghazwan Hassan in Tikrit; Writing by Isabel Coles; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)