Six more bodies found in Baghdad

Iraqi police yesterday announced the discovery of six more bodies in Baghdad, most of them tortured before being executed, raising the spectre of sectarian violence.

The grim find came a day after police said 20 decomposed cadavers had been unearthed outside the capital and as Iraq and France celebrated the release of a French journalist and her Iraqi fixer after a five-month hostage ordeal.

Three bodies, including those of two tortured policemen brothers, were found in eastern Baghdad, police said yesterday, and another three unidentified, blindfolded and tortured bodies in the north of the capital.

Police said on Sunday they had found the decomposed bodies of 20 executed men near Nahrawan, southeast of the capital, who had also been tortured before dying.

The discovery led Iraq's main Sunni clerical organization, the Committee of Muslim Scholars, to claim the dead were Sunni civilians, after charging last month that a former Shiite militia had carried out tit-for-tat killings of Sunnis.

Shiites have been a regular target of the relentless Sunni insurgency that killed almost 700 people last month. The Committee accused a Shiite militia of killing Sunnis, amid a spate of attacks between the two communities, including some targeting religious leaders.

"It is the Badr Organization which is responsible for these killings. I take responsibility for what I am saying," said Committee spokesman Hareth al-Dhari.

The Badr Organization replaced the officially disbanded militia of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of two leading political parties in the United Iraqi Alliance, which now dominates the government.

US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick warned at the time that insurgents "are trying to split the society through sectarian killings."

Iraq's Shiites are struggling to bring the disempowered Sunni minority into the political process after it largely boycotted January's elections, including the drawing up of the country's new constitution.

Attacks and clashes north of the capital late Sunday and early yesterday killed 11 members of Iraqi security forces, while another soldier's body was discovered in a river and a businessman was shot dead as he left a US base in Dhuluiyah.

As former French hostage Florence Aubenas enjoyed her first day of rest after five months held hostage in Iraq, her co-captive and fixer Hussein Hanun recovered from his ordeal with his family in Baghdad.

Aubenas, a writer for the center-left daily Liberation, and Hanun were released on Saturday after being taken hostage in Baghdad on Jan. 5.

On her arrival in France, Aubenas told reporters she had been kept in "severe" conditions in a basement, with her hands and ankles bound and a blindfold over her eyes almost all the time.

French authorities did not give any details on the circumstances of her release, but denied a ransom had been paid.

According to Serge July, the chief editor of Liberation, the release was "a fairly complicated military operation" because the kidnappers drove around Baghdad for some time to make sure they could drop the two off with impunity. French authorities did not identify the hostage-takers.

The EU hailed the release, and called on "the different groups in Iraq to free all remaining hostages in captivity and pursue their goals through the political process and not through violence and intimidation."