At least eight people have been killed and 21 others wounded after a car bomb exploded in a city in Iraq's western Anbar province.

Police sources told Al Jazeera that the blast, which occurred the centre of Fallujah, came from a parked car and was not a suicide attack.

The explosion came at rush hour as many people in the city, which lies about 50km west of Baghdad, headed to work.

"The blast rocked the area and I found myself suddenly on the floor,"Mohammed Abdullah, a shopkeeper who was wounded in the blast, was reported by the Reuters news agency as saying.

"Once I saw the smoke and the burning car, I immediately knew it was a bomb."

The blast comes in the wake of Iraq's parliamentary election.

In Anbar, a Sunni Muslim dominated province, where 58 per cent of the vote has been counted so far, the secular Iraqiya coalition is leading the vote.

Fallujah was once a hotbed of the Sunni insurgency agaisnt the US-led invasion of Iraq, but security there has improved in recent years.

Since 2006, Sunni tribesmen and former anti-US fighters have joined forces with the US military against al-Qaeda, greatly reducing the groups' presence in the area.