Iraqi officials said Wednesday that 35 bodies - some bullet-riddled, others beheaded - have been found at two separate locations and they believe some of the corpses are Iraqi soldiers, who were kidnapped and executed.
Twenty of the corpses were found late Tuesday in a field near Rumana, a village about 15 kms east of the western city of Qaem, near the Syrian border, police Capt. Muzahim al-Karbouli said, according to The AP.
Each of the bodies had been riddled with bullets. They were found wearing civilian clothes and one of the dead was a woman, al-Karbouli added.
South of Baghdad in Latifiya, Iraqi troops on Tuesday made another discovery, finding 15 headless bodies in a building inside an abandoned former army base, Defense Ministry Capt. Sabah Yassin said. The bodies included 10 men, three women and two children.
Yassin said some of the dead men in Latifiya were thought to have been part of a group of Iraqi soldiers who were kidnapped in the area two weeks ago, Yassin said.
In Baghdad, two suicide bombers driving a garbage truck set ablaze Iraq's agriculture ministry early on Wednesday, killing at least three people and wounding 28 others, eyewitnesses and medical sources said.
The attack included a vehicle, which fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) on a checkpoint at one entrance to the ministry while a garbage truck rammed its way into a parking lot behind the ministry, a policeman said.
Following the blast, smoke was seen over eastern Baghdad just off the capital's main commerical boulevard Saddoun street, with flames climbing up the government building and devouring cars parked around the ministry. "Two men, dressed in police uniforms detonated the garbage truck in a street behind the ministry," a security guard said.
Elsewhere, gunmen struck a police patrol with a roadside bomb in the southern city of Basra, killing one policeman and wounding three more, Lt. Col. Karim Al-Zaydi said.
