Police found the bodies of 15 men in an abandoned minibus yesterday morning, as Iraqi leaders, under heavy pressure from Washington, began intensive talks to form a national unity government.
The discovery brought the total number of corpses recovered in the past 24 hours to at least 55, the Interior Ministry said.
The latest victims had their hands and feet bound, and were shot in the head and chest, said Major Falah al-Mohammedawi, an official with the ministry that oversees police.
The minibus was found at about 9:45am on the main road between Amariyah and Ghazaliyah, two notorious, mostly Sunni west Baghdad neighborhoods -- not far from where a minibus containing 18 bodies was discovered last week.
The bodies of a least 40 more men were found discarded in various parts of the capital in the past 24 hours, al-Mohammedawi said. All had been shot and many were also bound hand and foot.
The bodies were found in both Sunni and Shiite areas, many of them among Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods, the major said.
The dumping of bodies tortured and killed execution-style has long been a feature of Iraq's violence, but the number of such incidents has risen sharply since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite mosque sparked a wave of sectarian reprisals.
The grim finds underscored fears that Sunday's deadly explosions in a Shiite slum would unleash a new round of sectarian killing between Iraq's majority Shiite Muslims and minority Sunnis.
A number of the bodies -- including four strung-up from electricity pylons -- were discovered in Sadr City where car bombs and mortar fire killed at least 58 people and injured more than 200 on Sunday. Al-Mohammedawi did not specify how many.
The killings came as Iraqi politicians started talks to form a broad-based government, widely seen as the best chance of bringing stability to Iraq, but participants played down the chance of any breakthrough.
"We are not optimistic at all. There will be no result out of this meeting, just preliminary discussion on the speaker, president and prime minister posts," said a senior source in the Sunni Accordance Front, the main Sunni political grouping.
"Nobody is willing to compromise," he added.
In Washington, US President George W. Bush said insurgents were trying to ignite a civil war by escalating violence.
"I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead will be smooth," Bush said in a speech at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies at George Washington University.
"It will not. There will be more tough fighting and more days of struggle, and we will see more images of chaos and carnage in the days and months to come," Bush said.
Meanwhile, Britain announced a 10 percent -- about 800-troop -- reduction by May.
"This is a significant reduction which is based largely on the ability of the Iraqis themselves to participate and defend themselves against terrorism, but there is a long, long way to go," British Defense Secretary John Reid said on Monday.
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