At least 28 people were killed, including women and children, and dozens more were wounded in a double bombing in a Baghdad market today, the deadliest attack to rock the Iraqi capital in months.

The attackers first detonated a car bomb in the Sunni district of Adhamiyah, then minutes later a suicide bomber ran into the resulting melee and blew himself up, according to defence and interior ministry officials.

An interior ministry official said at least 68 were wounded in the rush-hour attack, the deadliest to hit Baghdad since June 17 when 51 people were killed and 75 wounded in a car bombing in the Al-Hurriya district.

Witnesses said that the attack took place at about 8am (0500 GMT) on a street lined with restaurants and coffee shops popular with Iraqi security forces, as a bus carrying young girls to school drove past.

“There was a huge explosion and before I went out to look another bomb went off,” said Fadel Hussein, a waiter at a teahouse on Kassra Street, the scene of the bombings.

“Heavy smoke was everywhere. There were so many bloody victims on the ground, we helped to evacuate those people to ambulances,” Mr Hussein said.

The US and Iraqi military cordoned off the area that was littered with glass and scorched cars as sobbing parents desperately searched for their sons and daughters.

One woman in her 40s and wearing a black abaya, the traditional black Arabic dress, sat on the ground crying uncontrollably. She sobbed: “I’m waiting for my husband who is inside the area looking for my son. I hope he is still alive."

Among those killed were three policemen, three women and five children, police said.

Suicide attacks are usually the hallmark of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which continues to have a small presence in Baghdad despite major setbacks after repeated Iraqi and American military sweeps.

Despite the dramatic improvement in security in large sections of Iraq, including the capital, militants continue to launch near daily attacks, most of them targeting US and Iraqi security forces.

Baghdad has been hit by a string of bombings in the past week, most of them small roadside bombs that claimed only a handful of victims. The US military says the capital has become much safer since the launch last year of a joint Iraqi-US security plan which cut attacks by about 90 per cent to an average of four a day.

According to the Iraqi military, the number of car bombings in the capital has also fallen sharply, falling from a total of 415 in 2006 to 61 so far in 2008.

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