Police found 23 bodies in Baghdad

At least 23 bodies, many of them hanged, were found dumped in parts of Baghdad, Iraqi police said Wednesday.

Photo: Police found 23 bodies in Baghdad

Late Tuesday, an American military patrol investigating a report of a suspicious vehicle found 18 bodies in an abandoned minibus in west Baghdad, Iraqi police and U.S. forces said.

The victims, all men, had been handcuffed, blindfolded and hanged or shot, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said. At least two appeared to be foreign Arabs, he added.

The vehicle containing the bodies was found on a main road separating Amariyah and Khadra, two mostly Sunni Muslim neighborhoods in one of Baghdad's most dangerous sections, Abdul-Razzaq said.

The bodies were taken to Yarmouk Hospital, where Dr. Mohanad Jawad confirmed two of the victims had been shot to death and the rest hanged. Their deaths appeared recent, he added. Iraqi police were investigating the incident.

Police found the bodies of four more men in an open field in Baladiyat, a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood in east Baghdad. The victims had been handcuffed and hanged, police Capt. Mahir Hamad Moussa said, noting the rope marks on their necks

Another a body, shot in the head, was found near a shop in the eastern Kamaliyah suburb, which has also suffered repeated attacks, reports the AP.

I.L.