Iraqi authorities have discovered several shallow graves north of Baghdad containing the bodies of 33 people believed to have been executed by Al-Qaeda earlier this year, officials said on Saturday. Police, health officials and local residents unearthed the bodies, many of which had been blindfolded and handcuffed, at the village of Abu Toama in the Diyala province north of Baghdad.
According to AFP, Dr Ahmed Fuad, director of the morgue at the main hospital in the provincial capital of Baquba, confirmed he had received. One of the corpses had a woman's long hair and another appeared to be a child.
Residents said Al-Qaeda drove everyone out of the village in early 2008 and transformed it into a "courthouse" where they tried and executed people from surrounding areas according to a radical interpretation of Islamic law. The killings took place over several months, with small groups of bodies buried together at different times, district police chief Major General Ibrahim al-Anbaki said.
When US and Iraqi security forces drove Al-Qaeda out of the area earlier this year, returning villagers were tipped off to the shallow graves by the smell of decay and an abundance of stray dogs in the area, Anbaki said.
