Sixty people were killed when three car bombs exploded in a town north of Baghdad Thursday evening, 70 were injured.

The attacks hit a bank, a vegetable market and a police station in downtown Balad, in a Shia part of the city about 90 kilometres north of Baghdad.

An Iraqi man raises his hands looking at a burning US military vehicle, in Baghdad, Sept. 29. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

Shootings and other attacks in Baghdad on Thursday killed 16 Iraqis.

U.S. forces raided the homes of two officials from a prominent Sunni Arab organization Thursday, arresting bodyguards and confiscating weapons.

The secretary-general of the Conference for Iraq's People said soldiers in tanks and Humvees, with two helicopters circling overhead, broke into his home in western Baghdad at 2:30 a.m., put him and his family in one room, and searched the house.

Adnan al-Dulaimi said: "It was as if they were attacking a castle, not the home of a normal person who advises Iraq's interim government and has called for reconciliation and renounced sectarianism."

The other raid took place at the Baghdad home of a senior official in the organization.

The Conference for Iraq's People and the Iraqi Islamic Party are two leading political organizations representing Iraq's Sunni Arab minority, which has complained of abuse as U.S. and Iraqi forces pursue insurgents, most of whom are Sunnis.

The two groups are campaigning to defeat a draft constitution in the Oct. 15 referendum.

Their leaders believe the constitution will divide Iraq into Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni areas, with the Sunni region having the least power and revenue.

In southern Iraq, British forces handed over their main base in the city of Basra to the Iraqi military to allow it to take over security duties.

The handover took place a week after riots broke out in Iraq's second-largest city after British troops stormed a jail ten days ago where they believed two comrades had been taken after being arrested by Iraqi police. The raid increased tensions between the British forces and Iraqis in the city.

It was the third southern city handed over to Iraqi forces within a month, following the U.S. transfer of security control in Karbala and Najaf.

Five more U.S. soldiers were killed in a bomb attack Wednesday, bringing the number of U.S. troops killed there to almost 1,934. The five U.S. Marines were killed by a roadside bomb in the western town of Ramadi, an area of insurgent activity.

On Wednesday, in a suicide bombing in northwestern Iraq, a woman disguised in a man's robes and headdress slipped into a line of army recruits and detonated explosives strapped to her body, killing at least six recruits and wounding 35. It was the first known suicide attack by a woman in Iraq's insurgency.

The insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for that attack, saying it was carried out by a "blessed sister." The bombing came a day after U.S. and Iraqi officials announced they had killed the group's No. 2, Abdullah Abu Azzam, in a weekend raid.