Twelve bullet-riddled bodies found in Baghdad

BAGHDAD: Iraqi police found 12 bullet-riddled bodies with their hands bound and showing signs of torture in south Baghdad on Sunday, security and medical officials said.

"We received the bodies of 12 men today, all of whom had died from gunshot wounds, mostly to the head," an official at Baghdad's Yarmuk hospital said. All the men appeared to be in their 20s nd 30s.

The bodies were found in the neighbourhood of Dura, a mixed district south of the city centre that has seen intense fighting in recent weeks between Shiite militia, Sunni insurgent groups, and US and Iraqi forces.

Like other flashpoints in the capital, US-led forces have flooded into the battered streets of Dura over the past few months as part of a city-wide crackdown on sectarian violence aimed at stabilising the capital.

The overall number of execution-style killings has declined since the operation was launched on Februry 14, but Baghdad authorities still recover 20 to 30 corpses from the city's streets nearly every day.

In another incident on Sunday, two people were killed and eight wounded, including women and children, when gunmen ambushed a market in north Baghdad, security officials said.

"The emergency room in Al-Kindi hospital received two bullet-riddled bodies and seven people wounded in the shooting," a hospital official said.

In a separate attack gunmen shot dead two people and wounded at least eight others in Nahrawan, a farming area on the outskirts of the capital, the official added.