Nine Iraqi children were killed and seven wounded in the south of the country when unexploded ordnance they were playing with detonated. "Nine children were killed and seven were injured in Missan governorate on Monday when they were playing with unexploded ordnance," UN spokesman David Wimhurst told a press conference in Basra.
"This tragedy highlights the terrible danger that unexploded ordnance represents all around Iraq," Wimhurst said Wednesday. Kathryn Irwin, a spokeswoman for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), said the ordnance that exploded was an Iraqi rocket. "There are thousands of stockpiles of weapons in Iraq," she told AFP.
Elsewhere, a U.S. Marine was killed when a munitions bunker caught fire and exploded, and a soldier with the Army's 101st Airborne Division died in a road accident in northern Iraq, military officials and witnesses said Wednesday.
Meanwhile, villagers pulled body after body from a mass grave in central Iraq on Wednesday, exhuming the remains of up to 3,000 people they suspect were killed during the 1991 Shiite revolt against Saddam Hussein's regime.
Uncounted bodies remained unearthed at the site, they said.
The mass grave in a village outside Hillah, 100 kilometers south of Baghdad, is the largest found in Iraq since U.S. forces overthrew Saddam and his Baath Party government last month.
Many of the onlookers were weeping, and some chanted: "There is no God but God, and the Baath (Party) is the enemy of God." Several women were holding pictures of their missing men.
Rafed Husseini, a doctor leading the group of local men doing the digging, said a total of 3,000 bodies had either been retrieved or located in the past nine days. About half remain unidentified while the rest have been identified mainly through documents found on the bodies, Husseini said, according to AP.
He said local farmers who had witnessed some of the killings by Saddam's forces had alerted them of the mass graves. "They saw the crimes taking place but did not dare talk about them at the time," Husseini said. (Albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
