Bodies found in Baghdad were strangled and shot

At least 24 bodies – many of them strangled – were found dumped in parts of Baghdad, Iraqi police said today.

Late yesterday, an American military patrol investigating a report of a suspicious vehicle found 18 bodies in an abandoned minibus in west Baghdad, Iraqi police and US forces said.

The victims – all men – had been handcuffed and blindfolded, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said. At least two appeared to be foreign Arabs.

The bodies were taken to Yarmouk Hospital, where Dr. Mohanad Jawad confirmed two of the victims had been shot and the rest hanged or strangled. Their deaths appeared recent.

The vehicle containing the bodies was found on a main road separating Amariyah and Khadra, two mostly Sunni Muslim neighbourhoods in one of Baghdad’s most dangerous sections, Abdul-Razzaq said.

Iraqi police were investigating the incident.

Police found the bodies of four more men in an open field in Baladiyat, a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighbourhood in east Baghdad.

The victims had been handcuffed and strangled, police Capt. Mahir Hamad Moussa said, noting the bruising on their necks.

Two more bodies bodies, both shot in the head, were found in east and north Baghdad.

Iraqi police found a body, handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the head in Shula neighbourhood, northern Baghdad.

The grisly finds follow a surge of sectarian violence unleashed by the February 22 bombing of a famed Shiite shrine in the central city of Samarra and reprisal attacks against Sunni mosques and clerics.

While sectarian killing has diminished in recent days, other attacks have increased, the Defence Ministry reported.