41 bodies discovered in Iraq included civilians and soldiers

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi authorities found 41 decomposed bodies — some bullet-riddled, others beheaded — at sites near the Syrian border and south of the capital, and said yesterday they included women and children who may have been killed because insurgents thought their families were collaborating with U.S. forces.

The gruesome discoveries were among 58 new killings in Iraq announced yesterday, including the death of a U.S. soldier in a Baghdad roadside bombing.

And early today, insurgents dressed in Iraqi police uniforms shot dead the chief of a central Baghdad police station, police sources said. They said the insurgents set up a fake police checkpoint and stopped the police officer's car as he was on the way to work at Salhiya police station. After asking his name, they shot him along with two other policemen in his car. One of the insurgents filmed the killing, police said.

In yesterday's' violence, a suicide bomber driving a garbage truck loaded with explosives and at least one other gunman shot their way into a parking lot in an attempt to blow up a Baghdad hotel used by Western contractors. At least four people, including the attackers and a guard, were killed.

The U.S. Embassy said 30 Americans were among 40 people wounded. No Americans were killed. In an Internet statement, a group calling itself al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack on the Sadeer hotel, calling it the "hotel of the Jews."

While Sunni Arab insurgents have repeatedly targeted Westerners in Iraq, Shiite Muslims, top Iraqi officials and civil servants, even Muslim women are no longer safe.

Decapitated bodies of women have begun turning up in recent weeks, a note with the word "collaborator" usually pinned to their chests. Three women were gunned down Tuesday in one of Baghdad's Shiite neighborhoods for being alleged collaborators. And in the northern city of Kirkuk, a woman identified as Nawal Mohammed, who worked with U.S. forces, was killed in a drive-by shooting, police said.

The decomposed bodies were found Tuesday after reports of their odor reached authorities.

Twenty-six of the dead were discovered in a field near Rumana, a village 12 miles east of the western city of Qaim, near the Syrian border. Each body was riddled with bullets. The dead were found wearing civilian clothes and one was a woman, police Capt. Muzahim al-Karbouli said.

The other site was south of Baghdad in Latifiya, where Iraqi troops found 15 headless bodies in a building at an abandoned army base, Defense Ministry Capt. Sabah Yassin said.

The bodies included 10 men, three women and two children. Their identities, like the others found in western Iraq, were not known, but insurgents may have viewed them or their relatives as collaborators.

Yassin said some of the men found dead in Latifiya were thought to have been part of a group of Iraqi soldiers who were kidnapped by insurgents two weeks ago.

Iraq's interim planning minister, Mahdi al-Hafidh, a Shiite, narrowly escaped death yesterday after gunmen opened fire on his convoy in the capital. Two of his bodyguards were killed and two others were wounded.

Qataa Abdul Nabi, the director general of the Shiite Endowment, was shot to death Tuesday as he drove home — the second high-ranking member of the Shiite charity to be killed in a week.

A car bombing targeted an American checkpoint outside a base in Habaniyah, 50 miles west of Baghdad, and another exploded near U.S. troops close to Abu Ghraib, just west of the capital.

It was unclear if the dead U.S. soldier was killed in any of the attacks. The U.S. military said only that a soldier was killed and another was wounded by a bomb as they were patrolling around Baghdad.

As of Tuesday, at least 1,509 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. Elsewhere, guerrillas struck a police patrol with a roadside bomb in the southern city of Basra, killing two policemen and wounding three.

And two police officers were killed and two others wounded in clashes with insurgents in the northern city of Mosul.

Police said the Sadeer hotel attack began when insurgents in police uniforms shot to death a guard at the Agriculture Ministry's gate, allowing the truck to enter a compound the ministry and hotel share. Guards fired on the vehicle and it exploded.

Al-Qaida in Iraq posted an Internet statement addressed to its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claiming it carried out the attack.

It said: "We have fulfilled our vow to take down the Jews and Christians." In an alleged response on the same site, someone purporting to be al-Zarqawi replied: "you have relieved us by killing the enemy of God. God bless you."

Associated Press writers Todd Pitman, Rawya Rageh and Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.