A severed arm, a flap of ear and the wail of a grieving widow offered a snapshot of the carnage in Baghdad yesterday after three vehicle bombs killed at least 70 people and injured many more.

In the deadliest explosion at least 50 people were killed and another 60 injured when a suicide bomber in a fuel tanker targeted a crowded petrol station in west Baghdad. Police said that he lured motorists queuing for petrol to his truck before detonating his load.

Hours earlier a suicide minibus bomber tore through a busy commercial street in the centre of the capital near a popular ice-cream parlour and a second petrol station. At least 17 people were killed and more than 30 wounded by the blast, which sent up a thick plume of smoke and engulfed surrounding cars and shops in flames.

“I wish I had died, not my husband,” a woman cried as she surveyed the devastation. Minutes after the explosion, an arm was still clinging from a branch of a tree and half a head lay on a nearby building. Pools of blood collected in the road along with lumps of flesh, whole ears, severed fingers and clumps of hair.

Iraq timeline: five years of conflict

From accusations that the weapons of mass destruction dossier had been sexed-up to withdrawal of British troops from Basra

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A furious man kicked the charred trunk of the body of the suicide attacker, while survivors, mainly women, cried in despair. “You see all this damage, all this blood? In one hour the authorities will clear it up and that will be it. When will this stop?” an onlooker asked as he tried to make sense of what had happened.

A 14-year-old boy stood in the road sobbing: “My brother, he was 18, he was killed in the blast.”

Adding to the toll, a parked car bomb left three people dead and five injured in south Baghdad.

Three American soldiers were killed by an armour-piercing roadside bomb in east Baghdad on Tuesday, while a fourth was shot fatally in a separate attack, the US military said yesterday.

A British soldier from the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment also died from injuries sustained in a roadside bomb blast in Basra on Tuesday night. The family have been informed. His name has yet to be released. His death brings to 164 the total number of British troops to die in Iraq since the invasion.

Yesterday the Iraqi Government faced one of its darkest hours after the Sunni Accordance Front announced its pullout from the Shia-led coalition of Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, over his failure to meet a list of about a dozen demands.

“The Deputy Prime Minister and the ministers will submit their resignation today,” Rafaa al-Issawi, a spokesman, said. The 44 MPs of the Front, however, will return to Parliament when it reconvenes in September after a controversial month-long holiday that began this week.

The withdrawal will have little practical effect on Mr Maliki’s Government, which needs only a simple majority to keep functioning.

However, it deals a blow to US hopes of progress on the political front as American troops remain in the firing line as part of a last-ditch military push by President Bush to quell the violence. The Iraqi Government was already weakened after the radical Shia cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr’s political bloc quit over a row about a timetable for the exit of US forces.

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