Over 120 shot dead in Iraq
2006-02-23 13:12
Baghdad - Gunmen have killed at least 127 people in Iraq in sectarian violence that flared after the bombing of a revered Shi'ite shrine and reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques, officials said on Thursday.
Amid warnings that sectarian violence could spiral further out of control, Iraqi political leaders went into an emergency meeting with President Jalal Talabani.
The bloodshed is likely to complicate the task of Shi'ite and Sunni political leaders who have pledged to set up a government of national unity in the wake of the December elections which illustrated a deep sectarian split in Iraq.
Eighty bullet-ridden corpses were brought to the Baghdad morgue between Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning, the deputy director of the morgue, Doctor Kais Mohammed, told AFP.
"I've only been able to carry out autopsies on 25 of them," he said, adding that all had been shot. The bodies, which had been dumped in Baghdad and its suburbs, could not immediately be identified.
High alert
Another 47 bodies of men shot to death were discovered along with 10 burned out cars alongside a road near Nahrawan, southeast of Baghdad, police said.
The corpses were found near a brick factory and it was not immediately known if the victims were workers from the factory.
Iraq has already placed its security forces on high alert and cancelled all leave. The night curfew in Baghdad was brought forward from 23:00 pm to 20:00 on Wednesday.
The upsurge in killings came after suspected al-Qaeda linked militants on Wednesday morning bombed the 1 000-year-old Imam Ali al-Hadi mausoleum, one of the countries' main Shi'ite shrines, in the town of Samarra, north of Baghdad.
Early on Thursday the police also reported finding the bodies of three Iraqi journalists working for Dubai-based Arabiya satellite television who were kidnapped near Samarra on Wednesday evening while reporting on the shrine bombing.
"The bodies of the presenter Atwar Bahjat, of cameraman Adnan Abdallah and of soundman Khaled Mohsen were found early this morning some 15km north of Samarra," police said.
In other violence, at least 12 people were killed in a powerful roadside bomb attack in Baquba.
The shrine bombing prompted global condemnation and appeals for calm, but large-scale demonstrations turned violent with attacks on dozens of Sunni mosques nationwide.
Gunmen also stormed a prison in the southern port city of Basra and lynched 10 suspected Sunni militants.
"They are trying to push us into killing one another," the government said in a statement.
The leader of the Sunni-based Islamic Party, Tareq al-Hashimi, appealed on Shiite religious leaders to control Shi'ite demonstrations which mushroomed around the country.
"We ask the Marjaiya (Shiite grand ayatollahs) to intervene before it is too late," he told reporters.
Iraq's top Shiite religious authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has urged his community to remain calm and has forbidden revenge attacks.