MOSCOW (Reuters) - Eight people were killed and at least 20 injured by a female suicide bomber in a central Moscow parking lot Tuesday evening, Russian news agencies reported.

Local television footage showed a blazing car parked between a large shopping center and the entrance to a metro station, with several bodies lying on the pavement.

Tass said a number of children were among the injured.

Russian officials did not immediately attribute the blast to Chechen guerrillas but the attack bore some of the hallmarks of previous operations by militants from the independence-seeking region.

"It was like a big thunder clap. I was just coming out of the shop. There was one explosion, then another small one, probably from gas," Alexei Borodin, 29, told Reuters.

"I saw five people who could not stand up. And there were other people who were in small bits. There was one man without a stomach shouting: 'Where are the police?"'

Interfax news agency quoted a source at the Interior Ministry as saying: "With a great deal of probability, we can state that what happened was a deliberate explosion caused by a female suicide bomber."

Itar-Tass news agency quoted an FSB security service official as also blaming the blast on a suicide bomber.

City police said eight people were killed and at least 20 injured, 12 of them in serious condition.

Exactly a week ago, 90 people died when two Russian airliners crashed almost simultaneously in what officials believe was the work of suicide bombers.

Russian officials have described that air disaster as a terrorist act and have pointed the finger at Chechen rebels who have been battling Moscow rule for more than a decade.

Hours before the air crashes, a bomb had exploded at a bus stop in southern Moscow injuring three people. Tass quoted its police source as saying the explosive device used in southern Moscow and Tuesday's bomb were similar.

In July last year two women suicide bombers, thought to be Chechens, killed 15 other people when they blew themselves up at an open-air rock festival at a Moscow airfield.

Six months later another female bomber killed five people near the Kremlin.