Posted on 04/21/2003 4:43:31 PM PDT by knak
A SECRET graveyard containing the remains of nearly 1000 political opponents of Saddam Hussein was reported discovered yesterday.
The al Qarah cemetery, about 18 miles from the centre of Baghdad, had unnamed graves containing political prisoners, the cemetery's manager and a gravedigger told a news agency.
Mohymeed Aswad, the manager, said the bodies arrived more than a dozen at a time, all political prisoners from the Abu Ghraib prison a mile away.
Relatives of those who disappeared under Saddam's regime have already started arriving at the cemetery, searching for their lost ones.
According to French news agency, AFP, the "secret" graves are marked with a steel stake and a piece of rusting tin bearing a number. The site covers three acres of land ringed by a 6ft wall. Mohammad Moshan Mohammad, the gravedigger, said all the dead who arrived in the last three years were aged between 15 and 30, men and women who had been shot or hanged. "They were all youths. The civilians were hanged. Sometimes a soldier would come through and they were all shot. I could distinguish them by their uniforms."
He said there were another five cemeteries in Baghdad with secret grave sites containing political opponents of the toppled Iraqi regime.
The manager said word about the secret burial ground had leaked out in Baghdad and relatives of the dead were arriving "now that Saddam has left". He said: "After all these years they might discover their boy, their brother, their husband, if they have the number. Maybe in 10 years we can account for all these people, and then close it down."
The news came as one of Saddam's henchmen implicated in political killings was detained in Iraq.
Muhammad Hazmaq al Zubaydi, number 18 on America's most wanted list of 55, was the highest-ranked regime member detained so far. His face was on the queen of spades in the deck of cards issued to US forces.
Zubaydi, a former prime minister and regional commander, played a key role in the brutal suppression of the Shi'ite Muslim uprising of 1991. He was featured in Iraqi news film kicking and beating captured Shi'ite rebels.
He was detained by members of the Free Iraqi Forces in the town of Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad and handed over to the US military.
The evidence of Saddam's brutality, however, did little to quell the row over his alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Russia last night insisted the United Nations and not the US should lead the search for the chemical, biological and nuclear programmes.
On the eve of Hans Blix's appearance before the Security Council when the UN's chief weapons inspector is expected to call for his team to be allowed back into Iraq, a Russian foreign ministry official said the UN team should finish its work. He stressed: "This could be done within a couple of weeks as it is obvious that there are no such weapons there." The Russian official also suggested Dr Blix's team had to declare Iraq free of WMD before international sanctions could be lifted. The White House is pushing for the quick scrapping of the 12-year-old sanctions.
Mike O'Brien, the Foreign Office minister, said on the BBC that achieving a democratic government in the country would take "two years". This is double the length of time Tony Blair estimated during a statement to MPs last week.
Mr O'Brien also hinted the UN should be involved in the hunt for WMD. "We need to have some element of independent verification. The UN inspectors are clearly a possibility for doing that."
Although no "smoking gun" had yet materialised, Mr O'Brien said it was an "absolute fact" there were WMD hidden by Saddam's regime.
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, also again stressed coalition forces would find such weapons. Reports in New York claimed an Iraqi scientist had told the US military Saddam had destroyed his biological and chemical weapons only days before the war began.
-April 22nd
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