Iraqi police said they found the remains of 19 executed men in the northeastern province of Diyala on Tuesday, including 10 heads removed from their bodies. The gruesome discovery in Diyala was made near the town of Moqdadiyah, 65 kilometres from Baghdad, provincial police official Lieutenant-Colonel Ismael al-Juburi said.
He said the victims had all been killed in the past few days.
The nine victims whose bodies were found intact had been shot dead, according to Ahmed Fuad, head of the hospital morgue in Baquba. All the victims were men, but their identities were unknown.
Meanwhile, two people died and some 20 were injured in a series of bomb blasts in Baghdad, while a suicide bomber targeting a US patrol wounded 10 Iraqis in the northern city of Mosul. The two people died in Baghdad from their injuries in hospital after being caught by a bomb blast in the Karrada district that initially wounded three policemen and five passers-by, security officials and a medic said, according to the AP. Shortly before, a bomb exploded on nearby Saydun Street along the Tigris river in the centre of Baghdad as an Iraqi army patrol was passing, wounding six civilians and four soldiers, the sources said.
In the Sunni district of Yarmuk in western Baghdad, three more civilians were hurt in a blast, and two people were hurt when a mortar round crashed on the eastern neighbourhood of Al-Fadliyah.
