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ZURICH (Reuters) - An amateur paleontologist in Switzerland may have unearthed Europe's largest dinosaur mass grave after he dug up the remains of two Plateosaurus. The dinosaurs' bones came to light during house-building in the village of Frick, near the German border. "A hobby paleontologist looked at a construction site for a house and happened to discover the bones," said Monica Ruembeli from the Frick dinosaur museum. The finds show that an area known for Plateosaurus finds for decades may be much larger than originally thought. "It could be that the area extends for 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) and in...

Mass Grave Sheds Light on Europe's Bloody History By David Crossland in Berlin Europe's soil is blood-soaked from centuries of fighting but rarely yields mass graves from battles that took place before the two world wars. One such grave has now been found near Berlin with over 100 soldiers who died in the 1636 Battle of Wittstock. Archaeologists say they can learn much from the skeletons which show terrible wounds. An archaeologist gently uncovering a row of skeletons in the mass grave found in Wittstock near Berlin. Archaeologists in Germany are examining a mass grave containing the skeletons of more...

Hundreds of blindfolded bodies found in underground prison Posted 1 hour 44 minutes ago An underground prison containing hundreds of bodies has been discovered in Afghanistan. Police General Ali Shah Paktiwal has told the BBC the mass grave was unearthed in a former military base on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul, dating back to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. General Paktiwal says many of the bodies were found blindfolded with their arms tied. The grisly find was made after a 70-year-old Afghan man, who recently returned to the country, led police to the site. "He told...

KIEV, Ukraine — Ditch-diggers discovered a mass grave believed to contain thousands of Jews slaughtered in Ukraine during World War II, a Jewish community spokesman said, a grim finding in a nation one Holocaust expert said had been “an enormous killing field.” The grave was found by chance last month when workers were laying gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, about 175 kilometers (110 miles) northwest of the Black Sea port city of Odessa, regional Jewish community spokesman Roman Shvartsman said Tuesday. The Nazis established two ghettos during World War II near the village and brought Jews there from...

Fitting the pieces together In February 2001, the Sunday Times ran the article Was this Saddam’s Bomb by Gwynne Roberts. I couldn't find the original but it is also on Globalsecurity.org . I only recently read this article and found it interesting but very hard to believe. One of the newly released documents CMPC-2003-015757 contains the Roberts' article in English. This is the first time I have seen it. I did some research and found no serious academic or professional rebuttals other than people who also found it hard to believe. However, it seems that supporting evidence has been right...

Forensic experts have excavated over 1,000 bodies from a mass grave in the village of Kamenica in eastern Bosnia.

A MASS grave containing the bodies of 22 people believed to have been killed during a failed Shiite uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991 has been found near one of Iraq's holiest cities, security officials said overnight. The discovery was revealed as Iraq remained shrouded in political uncertainty following the December election, with Sunni Arab leaders angry over a decision to annul less than 1 per cent of the votes because of fraud, although they did not rule out taking part in the new government. At least 12 people were killed in attacks across the country, including seven workers slain...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Municipal workers in the Shiite holy city of Karbala found remains believed to be from a mass grave dating to 1991, when Saddam Hussein's regime put down a Shiite uprising in the south. Also, more than 10,000 people marched through Baghdad in support of a national unity government of Sunnis and Shiites, while insurgent attacks killed six Iraqi policemen and two civilians in a fresh surge of violence. The remains were discovered Monday and were sent for testing Tuesday in an effort to identify the bodies, said Rahman Mashawy, a Karbala police spokesman. He did not say...

Karbala, 27 Dec. (AKI) - Police in the Shiite holy city of Karbala say they have uncovered a mass grave containing the remains of men, women and children. The gruesome find was made by workers digging a water pipeline. Local authorities say they believe the corpses are those of a hundred or more Shiites slaughtered just after the end of the first Gulf War, in reprisal for having staged an uprising against Saddam Hussein. There are believed to be as many as 30,000 victims in the Shiite revolt. Since the overthrow of Saddam in April 2003, scores of mass graves...

BEIRUT,(Agencies) - Lebanon has asked U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to extend for six months the mandate of an inquiry into the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora told Annan in a phone call on Saturday that the Lebanese government wanted the inquiry to continue for six months after its Dec. 15 deadline, and be open to further extensions, a statement from his office said. Lebanon's government agreed on Thursday to ask the United Nations to continue its probe into the Feb. 14 truck bombing that killed Hariri and 22 others, but U.N. diplomats said the...

ANJAR, Lebanon, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Lebanese forces excavated a suspected third mass grave on Sunday, a day after unearthing 25 decomposed corpses in an eastern town that was the headquarters of Syrian intelligence for three decades. Security forces were digging for more bodies at the third site near two other mass graves close to an old onion farm in the eastern town of Anjar, long used by Syrian intelligence as a notorious interrogation centre. Security sources said the 25 bodies found so far -- most now only skeletons in scraps of underwear -- had lain in the shallow graves...

BEIRUT: Troops exhumed the remains of 25 bodies from a mass grave near a former Syrian military base in eastern Lebanon yesterday, while an official said 12 more buried bodies - most believed to be Lebanese soldiers - were removed from a grave near Beirut recently for DNA testing. The identities of the bodies were not immediately known, but one security official said some appeared to be Lebanese soldiers killed during an October 1990 Syrian military offensive that defeated Christian-commanded Lebanese Army units of then interim Lebanese prime minister Michael Aoun. Residents of the eastern Bekaa Valley town of Anjar,...

WHAT IS the latest?” Iraqis ask as they come together for tea and sympathy in these times of hope and uncertainty. And there is always someone who answers by reporting the discovery of a new mass grave where the victims of Saddam Hussein were buried. According to the latest estimates, the remains of more than 200,000 people, the fruit of the 35-year-long rule of his Arab Socialist Baath Party, have been found in this ever expanding archipelago of death. And yet, as the fallen dictator’s trial opens today, he faces only one charge: the massacre of 143 men, women and...

Friday, October 7, 2005 THE LARGEST MASS GRAVE IN AMERICA? By Rich Buhler Special to ASSIST News Service LOS ANGELES (ANS) -- Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the sealing of what many regard to be the largest mass grave on American soil. (Pictured: Rich Buhler). There isn’t anything that points you to the site in the Odd Fellows cemetery in East Los Angeles. You have to search for it, but it’s there on the east side of the grounds marked only by a flat gravestone that says “IN MEMORY OF THE 16,500 PRECIOUS UNBORN BURIED HERE. OCT 6, 1985.”...

Zagreb. 15 victims who were recently exhumed from a mass grave in Croatia and were reported Croatian, were in fact Serbian, AFP reported, citing a publication in the Croatian Globus Weekly Newspaper. The mass grave was discovered nearby Okucani, which is located 100 km southeast of Zagreb. 11 of the 15 victims have been identified as women. The issue reminds of Vice Premier Jadranka Kosor’s statement at the end of August, when he said that civilian Croatians, killed by Croatian Serbs in the war (1991-1995) were buried in the mass grave. Analysis of the remains show that the victims could...

In the summer of 1988, the Islamic Republic took the lives of thousands, nay, tens of thousands of the most conscious, most decent loving human beings in our society who wanted nothing but freedom and happiness for all. Do not think of these prisoners as strangers among the people, no, you all know them: they were our friends, our relatives. They were our sisters, our brothers, our children, our folks, our comrades. Each and every one of them was a family’s loved one; our loved ones. Some believed in communism, some were religious. However, they had one thing in common:...

30 bodies found near Baghdad HILLA (Iraq): The bodies of 30 people, including two women, were discovered in a mass grave south of Baghdad yesterday, and police have made several arrests in connection with the grisly find. "A grave containing 30 mutilated bodies, of which two were women, was discovered at Awerij," about 20km south of the Iraqi capital, said police lieutenant Muthanna Al Shumari. Al Shumari said the grave, located in Babylon province whose capital is Hilla, dated back around around six months. Iraqi forces conducted house searches in the region and arrested 13 suspects, including a Sudanese and...

THE bodies of 30 people, including two women, were discovered in a mass grave south of Baghdad today, and police have made several arrests in connection with the grisly find, security sources said. "A grave containing 30 mutilated bodies, of which two were women, was discovered at Awerij," about 20 km south of the Iraqi capital, said police lieutenant Muthanna al-Shumari. Shumari said the grave, located in Babylon province whose capital is Hilla, dated back around around six months. Iraqi forces conducted house searches in the region and arrested 13 suspects, including a Sudanese and an Egyptian, Shumari said, adding...

MALISEVO -- Wednesday – Up to this morning a total of thirteen bodies had been recovered from the most recently discovered mass grave in Kosovo, UNMIK representative Marcia Pool said today. She was unable to estimate what the total number of bodies in the grave is likely to be. According to Pool, the bodies are most likely those of Serbs who were abducted and murdered in 1998. A UNMIK Police spokesman told Serbian journalists in Pristina that they would be permitted to visit the grave site. Representatives of ten Serbian families from Orahovac members of whose families disappeared in 1998...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, the militant Shiite Muslim cleric responsible for two uprisings against the United States last year, clashed with Iraqi security forces in the southern city of Kufa on Friday, on a day of widespread violence in Iraq. A mass grave was found at a dump near the Shiite slum that's al-Sadr's stronghold in the capital, and two suicide car bombs struck a market and a police checkpoint, killing at least 23. The clash in Kufa came after a defiant speech by al-Sadr that was read at Friday prayers, and it brought reminders of the...