BAGHDAD, Jan. 28--Explosives packed into an ambulance were detonated at a Baghdad hotel early Wednesday, killing at least three people and shearing off the front of the building.

Some witnesses reported five people had been killed at the Shahin Hotel, but the toll could not be immediately confirmed.

The blast occurred at about 6:30 a.m. (10:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday) on a side street off a main commercial thoroughfare in Baghdad's fashionable Arasat neighborhood -- the same part of the Iraqi capital where a suicide bomber struck an upscale restaurant crowded with Iraqis and Westerners on New Year's Eve.

Residents at the hotel said Sami Maajoun, the minister of labor and social affairs, and foreign contractors were among the hotel's guests. Body guards said the minister survived the bombing and walked away from the hotel.

The blast sheared off the front of the three-story building, spraying rubble and twisted metal across the street. Windows on houses as far as 200 yards away were shattered. One of the bodies lay for hours in a stretcher covered in a sheet and brown blanket about 30 yards from the blast.

U.S. soldiers surrounded the site and a helicopter flew overhead.

The blast follows another deadly car bombing that devastated the entrance of the headquarters of the U.S. administration in Baghdad 10 days ago. It also came a day after roadside bombs killed six U.S. soldiers in the cites of Khaldiya and Iskandariyah and two Iraqi employees of CNN were shot dead in an ambush in Baghdad's southern outskirts.

Residents at Wednesday's bombing expressed gloom over what has become a familiar sight in Baghdad. One resident said as soon as fortifications were put up outside the hotel's entrance an attack seemed inevitable.

Wednesday morning's blast was not the first time an ambulance was used in such an attack in the Iraqi capital. Explosives apparently hidden in an ambulance were used in an attack on the local headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in October.

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