President Jalal Talabani also became the second Iraqi leader to reject UN chief Kofi Annan's call for an international peace conference on Iraq after powerful Shia politician Abdel Aziz al-Hakim.

The death toll from Saturday's triple car bombing rose to 60 overnight as more men, women and children succumbed to wounds suffered when the blasts tore through a crowded shopping street at nightfall, medics said.

Meanwhile, at least 29 Iraqis were killed in violence Sunday.

After more than three-and-a-half years of mounting sectarian conflict, the attack, while vicious, was neither unexpected nor especially deadly; more than 1,800 Iraqi civilians were slaughtered in November alone.

But each new massacre hammers a wedge deeper between Iraq's Sunni and Shia communities and chips away at the credibility of the country's beleaguered unity government and the US-led coalition force propping it up.

The bombers were back at work Sunday, when an insurgent wearing an explosive belt blew himself up next to a police station near the northern oil city of Kirkuk, killing three officers, Major General Torhan Yussef told AFP.

Further south, at least 16 people were murdered in and around the restive town of Baquba, according to security and medical sources.

Elsewhere 10 people were killed, including three in a car bomb attack near a bakery in Baghdad's northern Qahira neighbourhood.

The US military also reported the deaths in action of three more troops, taking its losses since the March 2003 invasion to 2,887, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.

American soldiers killed six suspected insurgents, two women and a child when they called in an air strike to dislodge gunmen from a safehouse west of Baghdad late Saturday, the military said.

British troops, meanwhile, clashed with Shia militia during a search operation in the main southern city of Basra, Iraqi police said.

Amid the carnage, there is a growing realisation in Washington that the current US strategy is failing and pressure is mounting for either a major change of course or a rapid pullout of the 138,000 US troops deployed in theatre.

Attention has focused on the Iraq Study Group -- a high-level bipartisan panel of experts headed by former secretary of state James Baker -- which is due to pass its recommendations to President George W. Bush this week.

But on Sunday a leaked memo from former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, written in his last few days in office before resigning last month, revealed the administration has long known of the need for a change in the Iraq plan.

Rumsfeld's rambling three-page memo cites a shopping list of possible tactical and strategic changes, some of them mutually exclusive, but admits: "In my view it is time for a major adjustment.

"Clearly, what US forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough," Rumsfeld wrote, in a document passed to the New York Times and later confirmed as genuine by the Pentagon.

In particular, Rumsfeld favours placing more US trainers directly with Iraqi units, withdrawing other American troops from combat into five large bases by July next year, and sending commandos to hunt down al-Qaeda and Iranian agents.

He also implicitly criticises other US government departments when he says the Pentagon should "give up" asking them for help and hire retired soldiers to advise Iraqi ministries.

Instead of spending money rebuilding cities like Fallujah that rebelled and were recaptured by US forces -- "rewarding bad behaviour" --- Rumsfeld suggests paying off political and religious leaders "as Saddam Hussein did".

Judging by leaks to the US media, Baker will also recommend increasing the number of US army trainers, while withdrawing troops from combat and by early 2008 leaving only 70,000 in Iraq in a support role.

The White House may well be receptive to this idea, but seems opposed to another: that of reaching out to US foes Iran and Syria to persuade them to use their influence to calm the unrest in Iraq.

Iran's role in Iraqi affairs will come up for discussion when Hakim meets Bush in Washington on Monday. Talabani meanwhile rejected Annan's idea of an international peace conference on Iraq.

"There's a political process ongoing in Iraq and there's a parliament which is the best in the region. We've become an independent sovereign state and it will be us who decides the future of our country," he said in a statement.

On Tuesday, Annan suggested the idea in a bid to find a way out of the vicious sectarian struggle that has plunged Iraq into bloodshed.

"I do not believe, given the bitterness and the level of violence, that they can do it alone. The international community has to help them do it and work with them," he told reporters at the United Nations in New York.