Iraqi police recovered the bodies of dozens of people in Baghdad on Thursday as violence spread across the country following the bombing of a Shia shrine in Samarra.
The bodies were found riddled with bullets as fears grew that the country was sliding into civil war after the attack on Wednesday which destroyed the golden dome on the al-Askari shrine, one of Shia Islam’s most revered sites.
Police and army officials said the bodies of 31 men were found at eight sites in the capital, predominantly in Shia areas. Most had their hands bound, and they had had all been shot.
At least 40 more bodies were found in the village of Nahrawan, south of the capital.
Elsewhere in the country, a bomb targeting an Iraqi army foot patrol killed 12 people and wounded 21 in Baquba, north-east of Baghdad, according to an Iraqi army source.
Four civilians and the colonel commanding the patrol through a busy market in the centre of the city were among the dead.
Earlier, gunmen opened fire on a Sunni mosque in Baquba, killing one person and wounding two.
Baquba, in the province of Diyala, has large communities of all Iraq’s main sectarian and ethnic groups and has been a centre for Sunni insurgents.
Iraqi security officials have said that al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may be operating in Diyala.
In Samarra, an Iraqi journalist working for al-Arabiya television and two members of her crew were kidnapped and killed on their way to report on the attack on the shrine and ensuing protests.
The bodies of Atwar Bahiat (26) and her cameraman Adnan Khairallah and soundman Khaled Mohsen, were found on the outskirts of Samarra.
An official from the Dubai-based station said Bahiat was a Sunni who had previously worked for al-Jazeera. He said one of the crew managed to escape from the ambush and informed police.
More than 3 000 people took part in demonstrations in Samarra in response to the bombing.
The Iraqi government cancelled all police and army leave and extended the curfew in the capital and other cities after a night of violence in which more than 90 Sunni mosques were attacked.
Police said more than 25 people had been killed in Basra since the bombing. At least 11 people were killed after men masquerading as police abducted them from a Basra jail on Wednesday during clashes in the city between followers of the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Sunnis.
”We hold the responsibility of what had happened on the Iraqi government if it has the sovereignty, which is doubtful with the existence of the occupier,” al-Sadr said in a statement.
The new tensions come as Iraq’s various factions struggle to agree on the formation of a government after elections for the country’s first full-term parliament on December 15. They have until mid-May to form a new government but talks have stalled.
The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, blamed the US and Israel for the bombing of the shrine, saying it was the work of ”defeated Zionists and occupiers”.
Referring to the US-led forces in Iraq, he told a crowd of thousands in south-western Iran: ”They invade the shrine and bomb there because they oppose God and justice.” – Guardian Unlimited Â