Mutilated blonde corpse found

2004-11-14 14:48

Fallujah - The body of a blonde-haired woman with her legs and arms cut off and throat slit was found Sunday lying on the street in Fallujah, a notorious enclave for hostage-takers, marines said.

"It is definitely a Caucasian woman with long blonde hair," said a military official, who cut open a cover that had been over the corpse.

The gruesome discovery was made as the marines moved through the south of Fallujah, hunting out the remaining die-hard rebels after a week of fierce fighting to regain control of the city.

"It is a female... missing all four appendages, with a slashed throat and disembowled, she has been dead for a while but only in this location for a day or two," said Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the Navy Corps, who had inspected the body.

An AFP photographer embedded with the marines said the woman was wearing a blue dress and her face was completely disfigured.

The marines said she appeared to have been on the street for about two days.

Sweeps of rubble-strewn neighbourhoods in Fallujah have already uncovered a grisly underworld of hostage slaughterhouses, prisons and torture chambers as well as the corpses of Iraqis who had been executed, marines say.

Surviving hostages have also been found, but only one has been a foreigner - a Syrian driver who was abducted with two French journalists in August.

Two foreign women have been abducted in Iraq and remain missing.

One, Teresa Borcz, 54, a Pole, has blonde hair, the other, British aid worker Margaret Hassan, 59, has chestnut-coloured hair.

Borcz, married to an Iraqi and a resident in Iraq for 30 years, was abducted late last month. She has appeared in two video cassettes appealing to the Polish government to help her but her fate is unknown.

Hassan, the Iraqi head of relief agency CARE International, was kidnapped on her way to work in Baghdad on October 19 and has appeared in three videos.

She also holds Iraqi citizenship after marrying an Iraq and is a long-term resident of the country.

- AFP