A suicide bomber in a pick-up truck blew himself up outside the Slovak embassy in Baghdad on Saturday, wounding four people, police said. Al Qaeda’s wing in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the bomber was targeting a meeting of agents of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the embassy.

A police official said Iraqi civilians and guards were wounded. “The suicide bomber was headed towards the embassy but he blew up at a checkpoint next to the building,” said the police official. Some embassy staff were in the building at the time but no one was hurt, a Slovak foreign ministry spokesman said in Bratislava.

Al Qaeda Organisation for Holy War in Iraq said in a statement posted on an Islamist Web site that the suicide bomber had driven a fuel truck to the embassy while CIA agents were meeting inside.

“Their cars had filled the place and our brother ... came to them in a fuel truck packed with explosives and detonated it, and God vanquished them,” said the group, led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Washington’s most wanted man in Iraq.

Little remained of the truck but damage to the embassy was mostly limited to the concrete blast walls set up around the compound, similar to those at most public buildings in Baghdad.

Slovakia, an ex-communist state which joined the European Union last year, has been a staunch supporter of the US-led military campaign in Iraq. It has had 107 army engineers and security personnel in Iraq since July 2003.