Stray dogs lead villagers to mass grave in Iraq

TUZ ZAWA - Dogs digging for bones on a barren patch of earth in northern Iraq have alerted villagers to a mass grave that may contain as many as 50 bodies, a local official said on Tuesday.

"We found some bones," said Abdullah Mohammed, who heads a unit dealing with displaced people in the city of Kirkuk. "After that, we began excavating and we discovered that it's a mass grave," he told Reuters.

Mohammed said villagers pulled about 20 bodies from the site on Monday before it was sealed off by the Iraqi National Guard.

Forensic investigators and other specialists have been called in to make a full examination. Evidence from such graves could be used in future trials of officials in Saddam Hussein's toppled government.

"We think there are about 50 bodies in all," Mohammed said.

The grave is in the village of Tuz Zawa, about 10km west of Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed city in the oilfields about 250km north of Baghdad.

During his rule, Saddam tried to turn Kirkuk into an Arab city by driving out Kurds and Turkmen who had lived there for centuries. Villagers in Tuz Zawa believe the bodies found on Monday are those of Kurds killed during Saddam's time.

Reuters Television pictures showed scores of dry bones wrapped in old clothes and buried under loose earth.

An offensive known as Anfal (spoils of war) staged by Iraq's former rulers against the Kurds in the late 1980s killed an estimated 100,000 people and drove out hundreds of thousands.

The man accused of spearheading those purges, and specifically the use of poison gas against Kurdish communities, is Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as "Chemical Ali", who appeared before an Iraqi judge last week.

The discovery of the latest grave comes a week after investigators began excavating a site near the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya thought to contain as many as 500 bodies.

That grave was discovered when construction workers came across bones, skulls and other human remains as they broke ground on the start of a new building project.

Scores of mass graves have been found across Iraq since Saddam's government was toppled in April last year, many of them in the north, but also several in southern areas, where Shi'ite Muslims were targeted after an uprising in 1991.

Evidence gathered is expected to form the basis for trials of the former president and his top deputies, who are accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Majid and former defence minister Sultan Hashem were questioned by a judge in Baghdad last week at the start of a process expected to result in their trial. Any trial against Saddam is unlikely to begin for many months.

- REUTERS