When the survivor proved to be a Sudanese Arab — a member of a group mistrusted by many in Iraq — the neighbors watched silently. No cheers went up as rescuers carried the man on a stretcher down the hill of broken masonry, his body almost miraculously spared injury and his head twisting as he craned to see the destruction.

"Take pictures! Take more pictures of our tragedy!" a woman standing in one of at least four small, destroyed apartment buildings cried out to photographers as a neighbor wiped blood from her face.

"Let Bush see them," said the woman, who identified herself as Um Ahmad. "Let him be happy to see these pictures. Let him see what he did to us. We used to live in peace before he entered our country."

A man known in the neighborhood to be emotionally disturbed walked up to American soldiers at the scene to seek treatment for his bleeding face and back. As the Americans struggled to communicate with him, the man switched to English. "Why?" he cried. "Why?"

The dead in Baghdad included two women and two children, according to rescue crews.

Iraqi police and a U.S. military officer said the blasts in the capital appeared to have targeted the Hamra Hotel, which houses some Westerners, including journalists. The attackers apparently used a mix of high- and low-grade explosives and two vehicles to try to blow their way into the hotel compound, security officials said. The relatively sophisticated operation was almost identical to an Oct. 24 attack on the Palestine Hotel, which also houses Westerners. Eighteen Iraqis died in that triple-bomb attack.

A security camera at the Hamra filmed the first vehicle, a white van or minibus, as it exploded outside concrete blast walls guarding the hotel. The vehicle billowed into flame and dust as it drew level with a hotel employee walking to work.

The first blast appeared intended to blow down the blast walls so a second, larger vehicle bomb could enter the hotel complex, security officials said. But debris and craters left by the first blast apparently blocked the second vehicle, which exploded among the apartment buildings outside.

The force of the blast sent a bomber's foot into the hotel courtyard, and a scalp landed on the tile around the hotel pool. Part of what looked like an arm cleared the 12-story hotel to land in a yard hundreds of feet away.

A third vehicle bomb was discovered and detonated hours later.

The hotel bombings occurred less than a block from an Interior Ministry building where U.S. troops this week found a secret prison housing scores of mostly Sunni Arab prisoners. The security camera tape and other evidence indicated, however, that the hotel and not the now-emptied clandestine prison was the target, authorities said.

Friday's bombings in Khanaqin blew the roofs off both mosques, leaving them open to the sky and the tiled minarets above. Survivors gave nearly identical descriptions of both blasts: The attackers lined up among the rows of men and detonated explosive belts strapped around their waists.

The number of dead was expected to rise when the search for bodies resumed at daylight, said Bajillan, the provincial official.

Such blasts are comparatively infrequent in the Kurdish-populated north, which has been spared much of the bloodshed afflicting in the rest of Iraq. In Baghdad and towns just to the south, attacks by the Sunni Muslim-led insurgency on Shiite mosques have killed hundreds of civilians, particularly since the Shiite-controlled government took office nearly seven months ago.

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Contributing: Hassan Shammari in Iraq's Diyala province