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SULAIMANIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Labourers digging on a construction site in northern Iraq uncovered human skulls and bones on Tuesday, which interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said were part of a mass grave believed to contain some 500 bodies. Allawi told Iraq's National Council in Baghdad that the grave was found near the city of Sulaimaniya in the autonomous Kurdish region in the northeast of the country, where Saddam Hussein's forces carried out atrocities in the late 1980s. "Today a mass grave was discovered in the city of Sulaimaniya, with the initial number of 500 martyrs," he said. Allawi...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Investigators have discovered a new mass grave in Iraq (news - web sites) that may contain 500 bodies, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said on Tuesday. Allawi told Iraq's National Council the grave was discovered near the city of Sulaimaniya in the autonomous Kurdish region in the northeast of the country. He gave no further details. Evidence gathered from mass graves is expected to form a central part of the trials of former president Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and his top deputies, accused of carrying out war crimes and other crimes against humanity during their...

New Report Mass Graves Of US Soldiers Nov 16, 2004 By Bruce Kennedy, JUS In August, reports began surfacing about incidents of dead American bodies being dumped into the Diali River by US helicopters in the early morning hours. Fishermen on the Diali river area , a small river originates in Iran and ends at Deglah, 60 kilometer east of Baghdad, were the first to notice the American practice of dumping bodies wrapped in black plastic bags from helicopters at dawn time into the river. Some of the bodies, still wrapped in plastic bags, were caught in their fishing nets....

LONDON (Reuters) - A multidisciplinary group of 34 Iraqi scientists, archaeologists and police officers will be trained in Britain in forensics to investigate mass graves in Iraq, the Foreign Office has announced. Part of the programme involves field work in mock mass graves dug in Dorset. International groups estimate that more than 300,000 people died under the 24-year rule of Saddam Hussein and Iraq's Human Rights ministry has identified 40 possible mass graves. The Foreign Office has commissioned the charity Inforce Foundation to design a forensics training programme and has invested one million pounds in the project. The first part...

"BAGHDAD, Iraq — The images were shocking. A trench with piles of clothed bodies packed tightly together. Men, women, little children. Even unborn children. Some blindfolded. Some with their hands bound. All slaughtered in cold blood by the henchmen of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (search).

AMMAN: US-led forces compromised the case against Saddam Hussein and former Iraqi leaders by failing to safeguard official documents and secure mass grave sites, according to a leading human rights group. In a report yesterday, Human Rights Watch said the failure of coalition forces to act during last year's invasion meant crucial evidence for the trials of Saddam and other officials has probably been lost or seriously tainted. "Given what's at stake here, the extent of this negligence is alarming," said HRW Middle East and North Africa division director Sarah Leah Whitson. "US and Iraqi authorities were aware these documents...

In case you missed this story... Investigators have unearthed a mass grave in northern Iraq containing hundreds of bodies of women and children ... The body of one woman was found still clutching a baby. The infant had been shot in the back of the head and the woman in the face, the BBC reported. Now I know what my liberal friends (yes, I have a few of them) will say, "Sure Saddam was a bad guy and did all these horrible things, but we have a thousand dead soldiers and haven't found WMDs, so the war was not justified."...

This independent web site came up in a Goggle search. Powell and Rumsfeld are in a couple of the pictures. (Warning) contains very powerful images.

Lack of European experts has held up the excavation of mass graves in Iraq, according to an American human rights lawyer working on the investigation. Greg Kehoe said the experts were not joining in because evidence might be used to sentence Saddam Hussein to death. He accused European agencies of depriving the investigation of experienced staff who would speed up the process. "I don't have enough budget or staff to do more than one mass grave at a time," said Mr Kehoe. "That's why we need help from other countries. Europeans don't want to help out because of the ramifications...

Shoes and trousers lie in a mass grave site being excavated in Hatra, northern Iraq, Tuesday, Oct 12, 2004. Europeans skilled at excavating mass graves are reluctant to join the search for victims of Saddam Hussein's regime because the former dictator could face the death penaltyfor crimes committed during his rule, according to Greg Kehoe, an American human rights lawyer who is working with the Iraqi Special Tribunal."(AP Photo/Thannasis Cambanis, Pool)

A mass grave being excavated in a north Iraqi village has yielded evidence that Iraqi forces executed women and children under Saddam Hussein. US-led investigators have located nine trenches in Hatra containing hundreds of bodies believed to be Kurds killed during the repression of the 1980s. The skeletons of unborn babies and toddlers clutching toys are being unearthed, the investigators said. They are seeking evidence to try Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity. It is believed to be the first time investigators working for the Iraqi Special Tribunal (IST) have conducted a full scientific exhumation of a mass grave. "It...

Horror Unearthed From Iraqi Mass Grave Wednesday 13 October 2004, 1:47 Makka Time, 22:47 GMT Investigators have found 40 mass graves in Iraq Investigators probing mass graves in Iraq have conducted their first scientific exhumation of bodies. Hoping to unearth crucial evidence that could help in convicting deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, investigators said nine trenches in a dry riverbed at the Hatra site in northern Iraq contained at least 300 bodies, and possibly thousands. Those buried included children still clutching toys. "It is my personal opinion that this is a killing field," said Greg Kehoe, a US lawyer appointed...

MOSUL, Iraq - The young boy's skeletonized hand still clutched the red and white ball he had been holding when the bullet ripped into his head and sent him falling forward into a trench with dozens of other bodies. "It got to the point where I couldn't walk past that end of the grave," said Sonny Trimble, a St. Louis-based Army Corps of Engineers employee working in Iraq, recalling the grisly resting place of the child believed to have been killed at the age of 3 or 4. In addition to its work on roads, schools and other public works...

Iraqi Official: Saddam Will Be Executed Stewart Stogel Saturday, Sept. 25, 2004 UNITED NATIONS - "Saddam will be executed, the Iraqi people demand it," so confessed an Iraqi official travelling with visiting interim prime minister Iyad Allawi. Allawi has spent the past week visiting Washington and then moved on to NYC to address the 2004 U.N. General Assembly. Several members of the Allawi delegation speaking on background, told NewsMax that pressure on the Allawi government to "move" on the Saddam issue has been growing, especially from Shiite religious quarters. While no firm date has yet been set for the upcoming...

"We underestimated the scale of what happened in Iraq at that time," he said. "So far we have discovered 262 mass graves, with tens of thousands of people. It's unbelievably shocking - truckloads, busloads of people buried."

KEVLJANI, Bosnia - Forensic experts said Friday they had found remains of 182 people, believed to have been wartime prisoners killed by Bosnian Serb forces, in a mass grave in western Bosnia and that they expected to find more. "So far we have exhumed 182 complete and incomplete bodies," said Jasmin Odobasic, an official of the Commission for Missing Persons of Bosnia's Muslim-Croat federation. "Certainly there are 30-50 more bodies in the grave." The experts, working since mid-August, dug about five meters down into the mass grave, the second found in the village of Kevljani near the town of Prijedor....

September 13, 2004Police in Najaf have found the bodies of 200 men, women and children in a mass grave.The civillians were tortured and killed by the order of the Shar'ia (Islamic Law) court established by Rebel Moqtada Al-Sadr while he was in control of the city.Source: Al Zaman Newspaper of London

Dozens of bodies have been discovered in a mass grave near the town of Halabja in northern Iraq, the head of a Kurdish anti-chemical weapons campaign group said on Thursday. The burial site -- crammed with dozens of men, women and children in ragged clothes -- was discovered Tuesday during construction on a road between the villages of Abu Obeida and Djellila, said Aras Abed. Abed himself lost 11 members of his family when ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s forces dropped chemical bombs on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. "The three common graves at this site near Halabja...

KUWAIT CITY, Sept. 6 (UPI) -- Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin Monday said 262 mass graves have been found in Iraq containing remains of people killed by the ousted Baath regime. Speaking upon his arrival in Kuwait to attend a meeting of countries with missing people in Iraq, Amin said Iraq's security situation prevented the government from searching for more mass graves and identifying the bodies. "We are working on uncovering all the crimes of the former Iraqi regime including mass graves, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed inside and outside Iraq," Amin said. He said the information...

Saddam's Mass Graves - 265 sites have been discovered so far, containing 300,000 bodies - 1.2 Million men, women and children have been excuted by Saddam's regime since 1975     Back to Top of Page Visit KurdistanObserver.com for the most comprehensive news and views on the Kurdish issue