DAMASCUS — A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden car outside security headquarters in Syria’s biggest eastern city Saturday, killing nine people and wounding 100, state media said.

The attack, the first of its kind in Deir Ezzor city since an anti-regime uprising broke out in Syria in March last year, came as world powers discussed ways to end the relentless bloodshed.

A “suicide bomber” used 1000 kg of explosives in the attack on the Deir Ezzor neighborhood of Ghazi Ayyash, said state television.

The powerful explosion left a crater 3.5 meters deep and damaged buildings within a radius of 100 meters, the channel said, adding a four-year-old girl was among those critically injured.

It occurred on a road housing a military and air force intelligence headquarters and a military hospital, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Images broadcast on state television showed a large bloodstain on the ground, a damaged building and vehicles charred by the blast, as well as smoke rising from the targeted district.

“Residential buildings and public and private installations near the site of the terrorist attack suffered serious damage,” the television said.

There was no claim of responsibility for the bombing but, as typically happens in such cases, the opposition blamed it on the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad.

“The Syrian National Council places on the Syrian regime the entire responsibility... for the criminal bombings in several Syrian cities, including the one today in Deir Ezzor,” it said in a statement.

“These repetitive blasts are part of the regime’s plan to sow chaos and trouble, given that it failed to repress the revolution of the Syrian people.”

Elsewhere, a rocket slammed into ruling Baath party offices in northern Aleppo province, the Observatory said, a day after unprecedented anti-regime protests in the provincial capital of the same name. — AFP