IRBIL, Iraq - An Iraqi carrying hidden explosives set them off outside a police recruitment center today where people were applying for jobs, police said. The U.S. military said at least 50 Iraqis were killed.

State-owned TV in Iraq and Al-Arabiya television gave even higher casualty figures, saying 60 were killed and as many as 150 wounded.

At least seven cars parked near the center were destroyed by the blast in Irbil, a Kurdish city 220 miles north of Baghdad. Several nearby buildings were damaged.

Pools of blood formed on the street outside the center as ambulances and cabs raced to the chaotic scene to take casualties to hospitals.

The attack came as many civilians were applying for Iraqi police jobs at the recruitment center, said Capt. Mark Walter, the spokesman who provided the U.S. military death toll.

Police officer Shwan Mohammed first said that the attacker had set the explosives off inside the police center, but police Capt. Othman Aziz later said the attacker detonated them outside the building because of the heavy security there.

Iraqi civilian Hawra Mohammed, 37, said he had just dropped his brother Ahmed, 32, off at the center to apply for a job and driven away when the explosion occurred.

When Hawra raced back, he found his brother lying in a street, bleeding and unconscious. But Ahmed soon began to move.

"I lifted my brother onto my shoulders and took him to a nearby hospital," Hawra said in an interview. "The blood on my shirt is my brother's."

Hawra said he nearly fainted at the sight of dead bodies outside the recruitment center and that many of the victims were unemployed, just like his brother, and wanted to earn money as policemen.

Militants have stepped up their attacks across Iraq in the last week, often targeting convoys of U.S. and Iraqi troops, and Iraqi police on patrol or at recruitment centers. A key goal of U.S. troops is to eventually train enough Iraqi security forces to reduce the role now being played by the Americans in fighting the insurgency.

Including today's bombing, some 200 people have been killed in insurgent attacks since last week's approval of a partial Cabinet that largely shut out Sunnis Arabs.

Elsewhere, the U.S. military said today that two American soldiers were killed in separate roadside bomb attacks in Baghdad the day before. Little information was available.

In Baghdad, two legislators from Iraq's Kurdish and Sunni minorities condemned the attack in Irbil. Kurdish legislator Fouad Massoum blamed it on insurgent groups such as Ansar al-Islam, which operates in the Kurdish enclave, and Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, believed to be linked with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida.

"This is a horrible crime and a massacre," Massoum said in an interview outside the National Assembly. "Cooperation between the people and the security forces is necessary to fight terrorists like al-Zarqawi and Ansar al-Islam, who are the enemies of Iraq."

Mohsin al-Jarwa, the Sunni Arab lawmaker, said: "This is an inhuman operation, killing the sons of the land who were coming to protect Iraq. I don't believe those who carried this out were Iraqis. Iraqis don't kill Iraqis, and I strongly condemn this terrorist act."

An Australian task force arrived in Baghdad to work for the release of Douglas Wood, a kidnapped Australian citizen and a resident of California who has an American wife. In a televised interview on the al-Jazeera TV network, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer appealed for the release of Wood, saying the 63-year-old engineer had a serious heart condition.

On Tuesday, the first democratically elected government in the history of Iraq was sworn in, and the new Shiite prime minister pledged before a half-empty parliament that he would unite the country's rival ethnic factions and fight terrorism.

Still, despite months of tortuous negotiations, there was no final decision on seven positions in the 37-member Cabinet, including the key oil and defense ministries.