"I do not detect that would-be policemen or policemen who are serving now are deterred by these terrorist tactics," Chief of Defence Staff General Sir Mike Jackson told BBC radio during a visit to British forces in Iraq.

Some 47 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded when a vehicle packed with explosives blew up outside the main police headquarters Tuesday in Baghdad, the most lethal in the country for two months.

"There is a sense of determination in the Iraqi police service and the security services as a whole not to be deterred by these terrorist tactics," Jackson said.

"There is no doubt that the now sovereign interim government is setting about things with quite a sense of purpose. There are local elections taking place ... in advance of the national elections due in January.

"So there are mixed messages here and one should not, I think, take this appalling incident as necessarily being indicative of the situation throughout Iraq," he said.

Asked about the January elections, he said: "People are pretty confident that they can take place if everybody puts in the required effort and arrangements into it.

"I must repeat ... that certainly my briefing here is that this level of violence is not spiralling up into an out-of-control situation. That is not how it seems," he said.

During a visit to Poland, Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawar said Monday his government was working flat out to ensure that elections scheduled for January 2005 take place as planned.

Jackson dismissed suggestions that his visit to Iraq was intended to reassure British soldiers unnerved by the sight of colleagues facing charges and investigations into alleged mistreatment of Iraqis.

A British soldier was arrested September 7 on charges of having murdered an Iraqi civilian while serving in southern Iraq last year.