Mass Graves Found In Iraq

(CBS/AP)  Several mass graves have been recently discovered in Iraq, including one site holding an estimated 5,000 soldiers massacred after a failed uprising against Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, Iraqi officials say.

Another is believed to contain 2,000 members of a Kurdish clan, the officials tell the New York Times.

The graves, discovered over the last three months, have not been dug up because of a lack of qualified forensic workers and the risk of insurgent attacks, Iraq's interim human rights minister Bakhtiar Amin tells Times.

At least 290 grave sites containing some 300,000 bodies have been found since the American invasion two years ago, Iraqi officials tell the Times. The most recent sites, if the estimates are accurate, are among the largest.

In other developments:

Militants exploded three bombs Friday in the Iraqi capital, killing at least one civilian and wounding eight others, officials said of the latest in a string of deadly attacks across Baghdad.

Pakistan on Friday urged kidnappers in Iraq to release a Pakistani embassy official who disappeared outside his Baghdad home, and Al-Jazeera satellite television aired a video that claimed to show the man.

A fight broke out among prisoners at the United States' largest detention center in Iraq, leaving one detainee dead and a dozen injured, the military said Friday. The military said in a statement it had launched an investigation into the melee Thursday night at Camp Bucca in southeastern Iraq. The facility houses 6,000 detainees, or nearly two-thirds of all those in Iraq. The U.S. military had no information about how the detainee was killed.

A U.S. Marine died when an insurgent mortar round landed inside a military base in western Iraq, the military said Friday. The Marine, assigned to the 2nd Marine Division, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, died after a Wednesday attack at Camp Hit, in Anbar province, the military said.

A main Baghdad market went up in flames late Thursday, but officials said Friday they didn't believe foul play was behind the inferno that engulfed al-Shurja market.

On Thursday, twin car bombs killed 18 people in Baghdad, the highest death toll from an explosion in Iraq in over a month. More than 30 people, including five policemen, were injured in Thursday's blast, police said.

Al Qaeda in Iraq said two suicide bombers carried out the attack, targeting a police patrol; the claim couldn't be independently verified.

Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib, in charge of the nation's police, was in his office at the time of the attack, but left afterward to announce that he was fine and to examine the scorched road and blackened rubble left behind. Built by Saddam Hussein's government to survive major attacks, the building containing his office was not damaged.

Reports of daily gunbattles and explosions had died down in mid-March, and the Iraqi and U.S. governments declared that the lull was a sign that their fighters were winning the battle against the insurgency. However, militants have stepped up assaults this month.