World

At Least 23 Bodies Found In Baghdad

March 8, 2006 / 9:50 AM EST / CBS/AP

At least 23 bodies, many of them hanged, were found dumped in parts of Baghdad, while a string of explosions killed at least four people in the Iraqi capital, police said Wednesday.

An American military patrol investigating a report of a suspicious vehicle found 18 bodies late Tuesday in an abandoned minibus in west Baghdad, Iraqi police and U.S. forces said. The victims, all men, had been handcuffed, blindfolded and either hanged or shot to death, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said.

At least two appeared to be foreign Arabs, he added.

The bus containing the bodies was found on the road between Amariyah and Khadra, two mostly Sunni Muslim neighborhoods in one of Baghdad's most dangerous sections, Abdul-Razzaq said. Local officials assume it's another sectarian incident, but no one has been able to identify the bodies as Shiite or Sunni, CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier reports.

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

In other recent developments:

One U.S. soldier was killed and four injured when their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb, the military said Wednesday. The attack targeting soldiers from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division happened Tuesday near Tal Afar, the military said. Three of the injured were taken to a nearby military hospital. The fourth soldier was treated and returned to duty, the statement said.

Underscoring U.S. concerns over the deteriorating political situation, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad held a meeting with the head of the powerful Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the two dominant parties in the Shiite coalition that won the Dec. 15 elections. The Shiite majority balked at convening the parliament. Khalilzad told the Los Angeles Times Tuesday that the "potential is there" for a full-scale civil war in Iraq.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld rejected suggestions Iraq is engulfed in a civil war but predicted there would be additional "bursts" of sectarian violence in the weeks ahead. Rumsfeld also claimed that Iranian Revolutionary Guard elements had infiltrated Iraq to cause trouble. Rumsfeld also asserted that media reports have exaggerated the violence in Iraq since an attack last month on a revered Shiite mosque touched off a wave of violent reprisals between sects.

Al-Jazeera television on Monday broadcast a 25-second, silent videotape showing three of four hostage Christian Peacemaker activists, and said that the men asked their governments and countries in the Persian Gulf to work for their release. Tom Fox, the only American among the four captives, was absent from the tape. The hostages disappeared on Nov. 26 and the previously unknown Swords of Righteousness Brigades had claimed responsibility.

In a report Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraq's authorities may be violating international law by arbitrarily detaining thousands of people. The report, which studied the situation in Iraq over the last three months, said Iraq's prison system remains a major concern and lamented that an investigation into allegations of torture in Iraqi Interior Ministry jails had not yet been made public as promised.

Police say assailants attacked a Sunni mosque in western Baghdad with guns and grenades, killing a guard and torching two rooms on Tuesday.

In Wednesday's violence, a bomb hidden under a parked car near the University of Technology exploded as police from the interior minister's protection force were driving through central Baghdad, killing at least two people and injuring five, police Maj. Abbas Mohammed Salman said. The minister was not in the convoy, he said.

Another bomb missed an American convoy on the northern outskirts of Baghdad and killed two Iraqi boys who were selling gasoline by the side of the road, police Capt. Qassim Hussein said. He estimated their ages at between 10 and 11.

Elsewhere, police found the bodies of four men in an open field in Baladiyat, a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood in east Baghdad. The victims had been handcuffed and hanged, police Capt. Mahir Hamad Moussa said, noting the rope marks on their necks

Another body, shot in the head, was found near a shop in the eastern Kamaliyah suburb, which has also suffered repeated attacks.

The grisly finds follow a surge of sectarian violence unleashed by the Feb. 22 bombing of a famed Shiite shrine in the central city of Samarra and reprisal attacks against Sunni mosques and clerics. While sectarian killings have diminished in recent days, other attacks have increased, the Defense Ministry reported Tuesday.