BAGHDAD (AFP) -- More than 50 people were killed as a triple car bomb attack rocked the centre of the Iraqi capital on Saturday, in a gruesome reminder of similar bombings in a Shiite district of Baghdad the previous week.

The massive blasts ripped through the crowded commercial district as many Iraqis hurried home before nightfall, killing 51 people and wounding another 90, security officials said. Many of the dead were women.

Together with corpses found around the city, the toll for Saturday was a staggering 110 killed.

A defense official told AFP the first blast appeared to target an Iraqi army Humvee jeep patrolling the central Rusafa district at sunset. There were soldiers among the casualties, but he could not say how many.

The second blast followed immediately with the third just a few moments later, rocking windows 500 metres (yards) away on the opposite bank of the Tigris River. Shortly afterwards gunfire erupted around the city.

Ten shops were burned out in the blasts near Al-Wathba square, a historic commercial area popular with Shiite Kurds, and 13 civilian cars destroyed, said an interior ministry official, warning the death toll was expected to rise.

Around an hour after the detonations, five more blasts were heard, apparently mortars fired by one of the city's warring armed groups.

Saturday's attack followed a major security operation the previous day a short distance further north in the Fadhel neighborhood, in which Iraqi and U.S. forces raided suspected insurgent hideouts and arrested 28 suspects.

The bombings recalled a deadly attack on November 23 carried out in Baghdad's Sadr City district when three car bombs went off at various spots killing 202 people in by far the worst attack in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

The Sadr City bombing triggered Shiite reprisals against Sunnis and at least four Sunni mosques bore their brunt.

Police also reported finding 44 bodies in Baghdad throughout the day, 33 of them in the Sunni-dominated western half of the city.

In other violence across Iraq on Saturday, 15 more people were killed as insurgents and sectarian militia launched gun and bomb attacks in the region around the war-torn capital.

Five Iraqi soldiers returning to their base north of Baghdad in civilian clothes were killed when insurgents sprayed their cars with automatic fire, Lieutenant Ali Mohammed Hassan of the Balad police told AFP.

Elsewhere, at least 10 other people were killed.

The latest bout of violence comes as one of Iraq's most powerful Shiite politicians, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, headed to Washington for an unprecedented meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush.

U.S. press reports suggest that Washington is despairing of winning over the embittered Sunni minority and is planning instead to rebuild its bridges with the divided nation's Shiites in a bid to rein in their unofficial militias.

Meanwhile, Iraqi and U.S. military officials told AFP that between 30 and 35 suspects had been arrested in raids conducted in the restive city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, and that a hostage had been rescued from a gang of kidnappers holed up in a Sunni neighborhood.

An Iraqi army major, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that two of the detained suspects were Egyptians who had joined the Sunni Arab insurgency against the Shiite-led government and its U.S. backers.

The offensive came two days after the U.S. commander in Diyala province, Colonel David Sutherland, denied media reports that Baquba had been brought to a standstill by insurgents and was beyond Iraqi government control.

Nevertheless, Saturday's operation was billed by U.S. headquarters as an attempt to "secure" the city.