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Gunmen kill 11 students in Baghdad bus attack

Eleven students were killed in southern Baghdad yesterday when gunmen in two cars stopped their bus and riddled it with bullets, said an official with the defense ministry.

The attack took place in the southern neighborhood of Dura, scene of numerous attacks. The students were returning from a local technical college, he added.

The killings came one day after masked gunmen stopped two minivans carrying students north of Baghdad, ordered the passengers off, separated Shiites from Sunni Arabs, and killed the 21 Shiites.

One survivor of that attack, Haqi Ismail, a 48-year-old electrician, told the Associated Press that the attackers ordered the Shiites to lie down and before they opened fire one shouted, "On behalf of Islam, today we will dig a mass grave for you. You are traitors."

Earlier yesterday, gunmen wearing police uniforms raided bus stations in central Baghdad, seizing at least 50 people, including drivers and passengers preparing to travel outside Iraq, including two Syrians, an interior ministry official said.

They also grabbed people working in the area, where several travel agencies are based and buses pick up passengers traveling mostly to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, Lieutenant Colonel Falah al-Mohamedawi said.

The victims were herded into more than a dozen vehicles, according to witnesses.

Transportation worker Amjad Hameed said 15 cars belonging to police rushed into the area and began randomly seizing people.

"We asked them why but nobody replied," he said, adding that Iraqi forces and Americans came to the site afterward.

However, an interior ministry official later told reporters that the 50 people were detained as part of an officially sanctioned anti-terror raid.

Meanwhile, a Baghdad court sentenced an Iraqi man to life imprisonment yesterday in connection with the 2004 abduction and killing of Iraqi-British aid worker Margaret Hassan.

A court official said that Mustafa Salman had been charged with aiding and abetting the kidnappers. Two other defendants in the case were freed.

In other developments, forensics experts have unearthed at least two mass graves of victims from the brutal suppression of a 1991 Shiite uprising.

The chief investigative judge in former president Saddam Hussein's trial said they have documented evidence of more than 100,000 victims of the crackdown against Shiites in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War and unofficial accounts showing the number could be as high as 180,000.
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