A car bomb went off on Tuesday in a crowded area in central Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, wounding 13 people, a provincial police source said.

A booby-trapped car parked in the dense populated neighborhood of al-Dawassa in central Mosul detonated in the morning, wounding 13 people and damaging several nearby buildings and civilian cars, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The blast occurred at the same neighborhood where the governor of Nineveh Atheel al-Nujaifi lives, the source said, adding that the blast caused no casualty to Nujaifi and his house.

Two days ago, Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, was the scene for twin car bombings near buses carrying Christian university students in the city of Mosul, killing a student and wounding 65 others.

The buses were coming from the Christian town of Hamdaniyah, some 30 km east of Mosul.

Nineveh province has been a stronghold of insurgent groups and al-Qaida fighters in the war-torn country. The province has been the scene of major security crackdowns by U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces to uproot the insurgency which erupted shortly after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.