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Politics : Stop the War! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonder who wrote (11098)	4/9/2003 3:56:22 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21614

Suspected execution site actually a morgue Building houses 408 casualties of Iran-Iraq war Peter Goodspeed National Post nationalpost.com Tuesday, April 08, 2003 ADVERTISEMENT KUWAIT CITY - An Iraqi warehouse full of skeletal human remains appears to have been a repatriation facility for soldiers killed during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, not a torture chamber or execution site. On the weekend, British troops engaged in a security sweep of an abandoned military camp on the outskirts of Zubayr, southern Iraq, found a makeshift morgue filled with 664 wooden coffins and the remains of up to 408 people. They initially thought they had discovered a secret Iraqi execution site. A nearby courtyard had what appeared to be a custom-built shooting gallery and an office containing what the British officers said were cells with meat hooks in the ceilings and catalogues filled with photographs of people who had been shot in the head or badly mutilated. But after preliminary investigations, a special U.S. military war crimes documentation unit, the 75th Exploitation Task Force, said the bodies may be those of soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq war. Forensic scientists examined some of the bodies and determined the injuries were all war-related. Chief Warrant Officer Dan Walters, leader of the task force's criminal investigation division, said the remains and some of the documents suggest Iraqi officials had been preparing to exchange the bodies with Iran. Up to one million people died in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. The two countries are still trying to account for tens of thousands of soldiers who have been listed as missing. WO Walters said documents found at the site list "all dead people in the facility by name, rank and nationality." Some of the bags of human remains examined by U.S. and British investigators also contained personal effects, such as wallets, uniforms and identification tags. Iran was quick to lay claim to up to 200 of the bodies, saying they had been found in recovery operations in recent months and a scheduled exchange had failed to take place because of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. General Mirfeisal Baqerzadeh, head of Iran's search and recovery committee of those missing in action, told an Iranian news agency the last exchange of bodies took place on March 19, a day before the war began. "We officially call on the International Committee of the Red Cross to carry out their responsibility and immediately take the bodies from the invading forces and hand them over to the Islamic Republic of Iran," he said. pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com © Copyright 2003 National Post