Thirty bodies, most beheaded, found in Iraq

BAGHDAD - Thirty bodies, most of them beheaded, were found on the main street of a village north of Baghdad on Sunday, stepping up pressure on divided Iraqi leaders to form a government they hope can avert sectarian civil war.

Iraqi army officials said the corpses were found in Mulla Eed near the town of Baquba, 65km north of the capital. The motive for the killings was not clear but they fit a pattern of rapidly escalating sectarian violence.

Police said many of the victims had also been shot.

Another round of negotiations over the formation of a unity government more than three months after parliamentary elections failed to provide any relief for Iraqis.

"In practical terms, there is not a complete agreement nor is there total disagreement," secular Shi'ite politician Wael Abdul Latif told reporters as talks persisted.

Visiting US senators told Iraqi leaders on Saturday that American patience was running thin but renewed US pressure has failed to push politicians toward a deal.

Prolonged political deadlock and raging violence will decrease the chances of the stability Washington yearns for in the hope that American troops will eventually be able to leave.

Asked about comments last week by President George W. Bush that US troops may still be in Iraq in three years, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said many would still leave as planned over the coming year if conditions were met.

"If Iraqi forces continue to develop in the way that they have ... then it is entirely likely that there will be drawdowns of American forces over this next year," she told Fox television.

Fresh bloodshed reminded Iraqis that their country was in danger of sliding into civil war, with deep divisions paralysing talks among Shi'ite, Kurdish and Arab Sunni leaders.

As well as those near Baquba, 10 more bodies were found in across Baghdad on Sunday, Interior Ministry sources said.

Some were blindfolded, bound and shot in the head, the familiar signs of sectarian killings that have exploded since the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine last month touched off reprisals and pushed Iraq closer to all-out conflict.

In an unusual admission, Iraqi Interior Ministry officials said that a police major accused of taking part in death squads had been arrested.

Arkan al-Bawi, who works in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, was detained after visiting the ministry.

Sunni Arabs accuse the Shi'ite-led government of sanctioning death squads, which the government denies.

Bawi, whose brother is police chief in Diyala, was accused of operating death squads in Baquba, the main town in Diyala.

Death squads are a taboo subject with the Iraqi government despite mounting evidence that they operate with impunity.

Hundreds of bodies have been found since the bombing of the Shi'ite shrine last month in Samarra, which left Iraqi leaders openly speaking of civil war for the first time but has failed to jolt them into a deal on a new government.

Any new cabinet must try to stamp out the death squads and pro-government militias while also facing down a Sunni insurgency that has killed thousands, most of them Shi'ites.

US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has urged Iraqi leaders to crack down on militias, saying they were killing more Iraqis than insurgents.

Other violence on Sunday was small-scale by Iraqi standards.

In Iraq's second city of Basra in the south, a 14-year-old student was killed and two others were wounded by a bomb planted in front of a school, police said.

A woman was killed and three others wounded by a bomb left in front of her house in central Baghdad, police said.

And in the town of Wajihiya, north of Baghdad, gunmen killed two policemen, police said. Three guards of the mayor were wounded by a roadside bomb as they headed to the scene.

- REUTERS