A car bomb has exploded in the centre of the Iraqi city of Ramadi, killing at least eight people and wounding another 32, an Iraqi police source has said.

The explosion occurred outside a restaurant in a busy area of Ramadi, which is about 100 kilometres west of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.

Sources told Al Jazeera that the suicide bomber targeted a police patrol and at least two officers were among the dead.

Ramadi is the capital of Anbar province which was the site of some of the worst violence following the US-led invasion in 2003.  

While the level of attacks in Anbar has declined, security in the province remains precarious.

Meanwhile, the death toll from a spate of blasts in Iraq's southern port city of Basra on Saturday has risen to 43.  

"We received 43 corpses, and 185 people have been wounded," Dr Riyadh Abdelamir, the director of Basra province's health department, said.

He said that women and children were among the wounded in Saturday's attacks.

Ali al-Maliki, the head of the Basra provincial council's security committee, on Sunday said the blasts had been caused by a double car bombing and a third roadside bomb which caused a large fire in crowded Ashaar market in Iraq's second largest city.

The city's police command had late Saturday attributed the explosion to the short-circuit of a communal power generator.

Overall violence in Iraq has ebbed since the peak of sectarian warfare in 2006-07 but bombings and suicide attacks occur regularly across the country.

Iraq has the world's third-largest reserves and many of the oilfields are located around Basra.

Nearly 400 civilians were killed in bombings and other attacks in July, almost double the June toll, Iraqi authorities say.

Tens of thousands of people were killed during the height of Iraq's sectarian slaughter in 2006-07.