BAGHDAD, Iraq – A suicide car bomber sped up to American soldiers distributing candy to children and detonated his explosives yesterday, killing up to 27 other people, American and Iraqi officials said. One American soldier and about a dozen children were among the dead.

At least 70 others, including three American soldiers, were injured in the attack, Iraqi and American officials said. It was the second major suicide bombing in Baghdad this week. A suicide bomber killed 25 people Sunday at an army recruiting center.

The fireball from yesterday’s blast also set a nearby house ablaze, the American military said. The attack stunned the impoverished east Baghdad neighborhood of mostly Shiite Muslims and Christians.

At Kindi hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, one distraught woman swathed in black sat cross-legged outside the operating room.” May God curse the mujahedeen and their leader,” she cried as she pounded her own head in grief.

Hospitals and police said between 11 and 13 children were killed. Authorities scrambled to compile a count of the dead and injured.

“The explosion was mainly on the children,” resident Abbas Ali Jassim said.

An American soldier assigned to Task Force Baghdad also was killed, the military said. At least 1,759 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003.

The vehicle used in the attack was a brown Toyota Land Cruiser with a license plate from the southern city of Basra, police said.

In a separate attack yesterday, a roadside bomb exploded near an American patrol in eastern Baghdad, killing a 7-year-old child and seriously wounding a woman, police said.

In September, 35 Iraqi children were killed in a string of bombs that exploded as American troops were handing out candy at a government-sponsored celebration to inaugurate a sewage plant in west Baghdad. It was the largest death toll of children in any insurgent attack since the start of the Iraq conflict.

However, many of the families of children killed in September blamed the Americans because their presence attracted insurgents to the ceremony.

Following yesterday’s bombing, charred remains of an engine block wrapped in barbed wire sat in the road. A child’s bicycle was crumpled beside the street, which was splattered with pools of blood.

An elderly woman dressed in traditional black beat her chest in front of her house in grief.

“There were some American troops blocking the highway when a U.S. Humvee came near a gathering of children, and U.S. soldiers began to hand them candies,” Karim Shukir, 42, said. “Then suddenly, a speeding car bomb showed up and struck both the Humvee and the children.”

Hours after the attack, about 200 people turned out for the funeral of five of the victims, in keeping with Muslim tradition to bury the dead quickly. The crowd shouted “Allahu akbar!” – “God is great” – and some fired weapons in the air.

An American-Iraqi military operation launched in May has significantly reduced suicide bombings in the capital. But American and Iraqi authorities acknowledge that it is difficult to eliminate such attacks entirely.

In other violence yesterday, gunmen killed an Iraqi soldier while he was driving in western Baghdad, police said. Two other Iraqi soldiers, including one lieutenant, were killed in a gunfight in another west Baghdad neighborhood.