BU GHRAIB, Iraq, April 27 — They were killed perhaps three weeks ago, blindfolded, their hands bound behind their backs, then shot by a government that was itself about to die. Even as American troops neared the huge prison here, Iraq continued to execute suspected spies.
In the last two days, relatives looking for loved ones have unearthed 14 bodies, not inside a cemetery, but in a pit just outside Block 5, which was reserved for foreigners. Neighbors said they had found 10 more corpses on the prison grounds — like the others, all in civilian clothes and apparently killed recently.
"He is a criminal of war," said Jumaa Khalef, 21, one of the neighbors, referring to Saddam Hussein, who was forced from power on April 9, perhaps a day or two after the men here were killed. "Someone who will kill people like this — what else can you call him?"
Iraqis almost never learned the fate of loved ones executed in Mr. Hussein's 24 years as president, though the personal stories told in the two weeks since then reveal a scale of torture and killing that may surpass the predictions of even his worst critics.
The last few days have brought some hope in the form of millions of reclaimed documents on Iraq's cemeteries and intelligence services. Already several dozen people have recovered the remains of executed relatives, most in graves marked only with numbers inside Al Kharq cemetery., a mile from the prison here.
But chances seem slim for the families of many of these last victims of Mr. Hussein's rule. The grave holding the 14 bodies was not marked. It was discovered only by the stench.
For the last two days, people with missing relatives have picked carefully through the dirt, their mouths and noses covered against the smell, finding men in blue and white striped prison pajamas with faces already disfigured by rot. Hungry stray dogs have made the job harder.
"We're not here to play!" Firas Ahmad, whose husband was arrested on March 3, shrieked in grief at the men helping uncover the bodies; to her, they were not helping enough. "We're trying to find our loved ones. Do you have loved ones missing? Do you?"
She was unable to find anyone who looked enough like her husband, Abdel Ibrahim Kadr, 37, and at one point she went into the back seat of her car to cry. He was arrested, she said, because he had a Thuraya, the small satellite telephones banned for all but Mr. Hussein's elite. He was also a Kurd, and that may have added to the suspicion against him.
Former inmates say the last prisoners at Abu Ghraib, one of the biggest and most feared jails in Iraq, about 9 miles west of Baghdad, were held as spies. Thousands of other prisoners were released in October in an amnesty declared by Mr. Hussein as tensions between Iraq and the United States grew. Many of these last prisoners were held in the same block where four foreign journalists, two from Newsday, were held for eight days, also on suspicion of spying, then released on April 1.
Saleh Hassan, 47, a merchant, said he had been held in the block since March 10, having been arrested and jailed in an intelligence headquarters for nearly a month before on suspicion that he might cooperate with the Americans.
One night in the first week of April, he said, about 30 prisoners were taken away. Then, he said, he heard shots outside the cellblock's walls.
One afternoon a few days later, he said, 10 more were taken away, though he heard no shots.
"They were a combination of people — Kurds, Arabs, Islamists," he said, adding that all were suspected of being spies, and that many of them were caught with Thuraya phones. "If you had a Thuraya, you were considered a spy."
Mr. Khalef, one of the neighbors, said he found four corpses lying in the open the day after the American forces arrived (relatives and journalists did not have access to the prison until two days ago, when American troops who had been guarding it inexplicably left). Like the others, the victims had been blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs. He said he personally had buried them, three in one grave, one in a second.
Today, the graves appeared to have been dug up, though the holes were still littered with clothing and sandals. Mr. Khalef showed two identity cards, not entirely legible, that he said he had found on the men. One, named Ahmad, was Sudanese. The other was named Muhammad Sayid Abdel Hadi, and the card appeared to identify him as an Egyptian.
Close to the execution chamber at Abu Ghraib — where two thick ropes still hang over the two trapdoors that dropped condemned men to their deaths by hanging — six more bodies were found just after the Americans arrived, according to another neighbor, Ali Hamid Muhammad, who said he had found them.
Two of the bodies where headless, he said. Four more, he said, were partly buried, their heads mangled. All were in civilian clothing.
"They looked like they had been killed recently, a day or two before," said Mr. Muhammad, who said he was a prisoner there for six years, ending in the October amnesty .