Seven Bodies Discovered in Ramadi Belonged to Followers of Zarqawi
BAGHDAD -- When more than 80 bodies, many of them slain Iraqi police officers and soldiers, were found last week at four sites in Iraq, a fifth gruesome discovery attracted little notice. In the violent city of Ramadi, a center of insurgent activity 60 miles west of Baghdad, the bodies of seven men were found neatly lined up in an unfinished house on the western outskirts of town, according to witnesses.
Each had been shot in the head or torso. Some witnesses said the bodies were then secretly buried in a local cemetery. Witnesses said they never went to the local police or foreign military forces to report finding the bodies, fearing that they would be accused of complicity in the slayings or that the killers would return to punish them for talking.
"I feared telling the Iraqi army because they would detain me and accuse me of being involved in the killings," said Ali Omar, 32, a motorcycle mechanic who found the bodies on the morning of March 12. Instead, he went to Ramadi Hospital and told an emergency room doctor about his discovery, but the doctor refused to get involved. "He told me, 'Why bring problems on yourself? Leave them until they find them,' " Omar said.
Witnesses also said the event went unreported because the dead men were foreigners, all Sunni Muslims and members of al Qaeda in Iraq, the radical group headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi that is at the forefront of the insurgency. Now that details of the slayings have surfaced, Zarqawi is vowing revenge.
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