The Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI) said Wednesday it had information on 150 mass graves throughout Iraq. "SAIRI has lists showing the presence of 150 mass graves in various Iraqi towns, but which have not yet been discovered," Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, number two of the Shiite Muslim opposition movement, told the Iraqi newspaper, Al-Zaman. "We decided to delay announcing the discovery of these graves to protect them until the re-establishment of a government in Iraq and an appeal to international organisations to identify the bodies."
| "We don't want no Merkins messin' around with them..." |
Hakim said those responsible for the graves "must be judged" either before a national or international court depending on the seriousness of their crimes. The Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC) said Tuesday that 14 more mass graves have been discovered in post-Saddam Iraq since last week. The group said last week that a grave in the town of Habbaniyah outside Baghdad was believed to have contained at least some of the roughly 600 Kuwaitis missing since the 1991 Gulf War. Kuwaiti forensic teams are investigating the claim.
| That's why Sammy didn't manage to repatriate them in ten or 12 years... |
The INC has set up a committee to list the Iraqis reported missing under Saddam Hussein's rule. Human rights groups have said as many as 300,000 people may have been executed by his regime. A British forensic team will head for Iraq on Wednesday to help with investigations into graves which could hold the bodies of countless victims, government officials said on Tuesday. A Foreign Office spokesman said the nine-strong team included a forensic photographer, a scene-of-crime expert and two anthropologists. |