"After the explosion, not a single person in the square was standing. I thought everyone was dead," said Khaled Nasser, a labourer who searched the wreckage for four of his companions.

"I found them all cut in half, no legs, and for some I could only find their heads."

 

Two buildings were severely damaged in the blasts and dozens of shops were burned, while plumbing fixtures and tools from vendors' stalls lay scattered through the bloody debris.

 

"We are treating 25 people with extremely serious injuries," a doctor from Ibn al-Nafis hospital said.

 

Afterwards, Iraq's Sunni parliamentary speaker described the attackers as "outlaws and without a religion", and called upon all armed groups to observe a truce for two months.

 

In a statement, Mahmud Mashhadani said: "This massacre shows that those terror groups are endeavouring to create chaos and killing, beside arousing sectarianism in the country.

 

"Security forces will track down those criminals and arrest them and take them to justice to get the punishment they deserve." 

Doctors attend to the casualties of Tuesday's bombings in Baghdad's Tayran Square

Many Iraqis doubt, however, the security forces' ability to halt the country's rapid slide into lawlessness.

In other violence, an Iraqi cameraman working with Associated Press Television Network (APTN) was shot dead in the northern city of Mosul Tuesday.

"The AP has received word that an APTN cameraman in Mosul, Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah was killed today by gunfire in the city," Robert Reid, an AP correspondent in Baghdad, said in a statement.

"Aswan leaves a wife and two children and worked for APTN in Mosul since 2005, we are stunned and saddened by this news."

At least 127 journalists and media workers have been killed across Iraq since March 2003 according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Elsewhere five people were killed while police found 13 bodies in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad.