Grave yields 150 killed as troops neared Baghdad

Witnesses told yesterday how Iraqi intelligence officers executed at least 150 prisoners in early April, three days before US troops entered Baghdad.

The bodies of the dead, all blindfolded with strips of cloth torn from their shirts and with their hands tied behind their backs, were dumped in a long trench in the grounds of the Salman Pak military training camp, 32 kilometres south-east of Baghdad.

All were men dressed in prison uniforms and were shot in the back of the head with a single bullet from a pistol.

Yesterday a dozen volunteers from a Shia Muslim party dug with spades and their bare hands to remove the bodies from the grave. The victims carried no identification, but they were all thought to be Shia prisoners. One had a small copy of the Koran in his chest pocket.

Many of the mass graves recently uncovered date from the 1991 uprising that was encouraged by the US in the wake of the previous Gulf war and viciously crushed by Saddam Hussein.

The grave at Salman Pak is the first evidence that the brutality of the regime ran on until moments before it collapsed. At least 200 000 Iraqis went missing under the reign of the Ba’ath party, many summarily executed.

As he watched the decaying bodies being dug from the dusty soil at Salman Pak yesterday, Sayed Sloumi (47) described how he saw the prisoners being driven to the site at around 2pm on April 4.

”We were sitting in a cafe on the main road when we saw three dark red buses come past heading in this direction. We could see prisoners in the bus. Their eyes were covered with blindfolds from their shirts.”

There appeared to be seven guards on each bus, he said. They drove into the grounds of Salman Pak and the prisoners were not seen alive again.

Salman Pak was a centre for training special forces, and a base for the mukhabarat intelligence agency. But on April 10, after the fall of the regime, Iraqis broke into the site and found the bodies in the trench, half-eaten by wild dogs.

”We found bullets from a handgun and a fresh packet of Kent cigarettes that the soldiers had been smoking,” Sloumi said.

The bodies had not been covered with earth, and were partly decomposed. Among them was the body of an Iraqi intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jamal. Volunteers at the site said they believed he had refused to take part in the execution and was then killed by his colleagues. His family have retrieved his body.

At least two more unrecognisable bodies were pulled out of the grave yesterday. More than 150 have now been found, but many suspect that the site holds more unmarked graves.

”I believe that the people who killed them were truly evil,” said Sa’ad Hassan al-Kahwachi (33) one of the volunteers digging there yesterday.

Some, like Kahwachi, wore white plastic gloves; others used their bare fingers or wrapped their hands in plastic bags as they pulled bones and tufts of hair from the ground.

The recovery work, aided by a mechanical digger, was organised by a humanitarian group called al-Wala, run by a hardline faction that dominates the eastern Shia district of Baghdad.

There was no attempt to record or preserve forensic evidence that might identify the dead or their killers.

Human rights groups have criticised the US and British military for failing to provide a full forensic examination of the many grave sites across the country.

Among the crowd was a handful of desperate families, some of whom have spent 12 years looking for their missing husbands, sons and brothers.

Ajiba Ali Salman has been seeking her son Mousa since he went missing from Kerbala, aged 16, in April 1991. ”He left after breakfast and he hasn’t ever come back.If he did something wrong, then punish him and set him free. Why did they have to keep all these people?”