Four foreigners were killed and five Iraqi civilians wounded when a suicide bomber on Monday struck a convoy of vehicles of a private British company near a bridge in western Mosul, the capital of northern Iraq's Nineveh province, a provincial police source said.

The attack took place in the morning when a suicide bomber drove his explosive-laden car into a convoy of SUVs belonging to a British construction firm near the fifth bridge in western Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The bodies of four foreign civilians were brought out of the destroyed SUV, the source quoted an Iraqi security member in the scene as saying.

The name of the British company and the nationalities of the four foreigners are not immediately known, the source said.

The blast, which also damaged another SUV, wounded five Iraqi civilians, along with damaging several nearby civilian cars and buildings, the source said.

Iraqi security forces sealed off the scene and blocked all the roads leading to the area, the source added.

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.