KIRKUK, Iraq (Reuters) - A bomb in a parked car near a crowded market killed five people and wounded 30 others in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Thursday, a hospital source said.
Police gave a lower toll. Brigadier-General Sarhat Qader said three people had been killed and 18 others wounded.
The site of the explosion was a mainly Kurdish area, and the bomb did not appear to have targeted Iraqi security forces.
Oil producing Kirkuk is at the centre of a dispute between Iraq's ethnic Kurds, who consider it their ancestral homeland, and Arabs and Turkmen. Kurds want to fold the city into their largely autonomous enclave of Kurdistan in northern Iraq.
Arabs and Turkmen fear Kurdish hegemony.
Violence has fallen in Iraq in the last 18 months, but officials fear Iraq's waning insurgency may exploit the Kurd-Arab dispute to renew itself by posing as an Arab bulwark against Kurdish encroachment.
(Reporting by Mustafa Mahmoud and Sherko Raouf in Sulaimaniya, Writing by Mohammed Abbas)
