Iraqi police killed a female suicide bomber simultaneously as she exploded her vest near a checkpoint in the northern province of Salahaddin, a police source said Saturday.

Police tried to stop a woman, who appeared to be in her 20s, who was wearing long robes. After she ignored repeated orders to stop, a policeman shot her, just at the moment when she detonated her vest, police officer Mohamed Khaled Abdel Hamid told the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency.

The incident comes amid ongoing security worries about female suicide attackers, wearing black, head-to-toe robes, being able to more easily to infiltrate crowds because they are less frequently subjected body searches. Religious and cultural rules prevent security officers from touching women while conducting searches.

In Hillah, some 100 kilometres south of Baghdad, unknown gunmen in a car shot a leader of the Awakening Councils and then escaped. Abdel Hadi Ali Mekky was in his car when the attackers approached him with their car and shot him, police told VOI.

Awakening Councils or sons of Iraq are tribal police who have cooperated with the US to fight the al-Qaeda organization in Iraq.

Separately, a woman was killed and four of her family were wounded when a bomb went off in front of her house in al-Saeda district in Baquba city, a security source told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Another civilian was killed by unidentified gunmen in front of a shop in al-Moalimeen district west of Baquba. Baquba is located some 60 kilometres north of Baghdad.

In further violence, an Iraqi soldier was killed and another two soldiers were wounded in a blast at their army checkpoint in the Amariya district west of Baghdad, an army source told VOI.

Also, three policemen were wounded by a blast that struck their patrol in the Sunni Iraqi province of Anbar. The injured were moved to a near by hospital and Iraqi police cordoned-off the area in search for the attackers, VOI reported.