Nearly 100 bodies found in Baghdad

IRAQ: Police found the bodies of 32 more death squad victims scattered around Baghdad on Thursday, bringing the two-day total to nearly 100, and a Sunni leader said the slayings could destroy the political process.

In one of the biggest recent attacks on U.S. troops trying to pacify the capital, a suicide car bomber killed two and wounded 25, near Abu Ghraib just to the west of the city.

Bodies of victims bound, tortured and shot have been found in Baghdad for months. But the U.S. military acknowledged the last 48 hours had seen a surge in such execution-style sectarian killings despite a push to bring order to the capital.

"If these barbarian acts do not stop, certainly it will affect the reconciliation plan," Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the Iraqi Accordance Front, parliament's biggest Sunni Arab group, said of the death squad murders in a telephone interview.

In one incident, six members of a Shi'ite family, including two women and a 3-month-old boy, were shot dead in their home at a school where the father worked as a caretaker in a mainly Sunni district of west Baghdad.

Baghdad, Friday, Reuters