Iraq car bomb kills 30; mass grave contains 1,500 victims

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A car bomb exploded at the funeral of a Kurdish official in northern Iraq on Sunday, killing about 30 Iraqis and wounding more than 50, the U.S. military, as the death toll in a wave of violence against Iraq's new government rose to at least 120.\nInsurgents launched several other attacks across Iraq, killing 10 people, on Sunday. U.S. and Iraqi forces also detained several suspects in the abduction of a British aid worker believed killed last year and found clothing and documents that apparently belonged to her.\nThe attack on the funeral occurred in the city of Tal Afar, 90 miles east of the Syrian border, said Khisru Goran, the deputy provincial governor and a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Party.\nThe attack comes just after investigators uncovered a large grave in Iraq that may contain the bodies of 1,500 Kurds killed in the 1980s. It could produce evidence needed to prosecute ousted leader Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants for mass killings during his regime.\nGoran said a suicide attacker detonated a car packed with explosives in a large tent where the funeral was being held. But the U.S. military said it was not a suicide attack.\nThe blast killed about 30 Iraqis and wounded more than 50, a U.S. military statement said, adding: "Terrorists continue to target and disregard the safety of innocent citizens during their attacks."\nThe funeral was being held for Sayed Talib Sayed Wahab, a KDP official gunned down by insurgents Saturday in Mosul, Goran said.\nInternational forensic experts last week examined the mass grave site in Samawa, on the Euphrates River, about 230 miles southeast of Baghdad. Many of those buried in the 18 trenches were believed to be Kurds killed in 1987 and 1988 during a scorched-earth campaign, said Gregg Nivala, from the U.S. government's Regime Crimes Liaison Office.\n"These were not combatants," he said. "They were women and children."\nDuring the campaign known as Anfal, which means "spoils of war" in Arabic, hundreds of thousands of Kurds were killed or expelled from northern Iraq. The campaign included the gruesome 1988 chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja. The Saddam regime was carrying out a program of removing Kurds from the northern homeland and replacing them with Arabs. Many of the Kurdish victims were buried in Iraq's central and southern desert.\nThe Samawa site contained a skull with pink and white dentures belonging to an old woman, investigators said. A skeleton nearby was that of a teenage girl, still clutching a brightly colored bag of possessions. The trenches were full of the skeletons of Iraqi Kurds, still in their distinctive, colorful garb, buried where they fell after being shot dead nearly 20 years ago.\nOutgoing Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin, himself a Kurd, said half a million people perished and 182,000 are missing.\n"We must know what happened (and deal with) collective memory, so we can do justice, rather than revenge," Amin said.\nThe first 100 remains of the estimated 1,500 at the site would be used to certify cause of death, the identity of the victims and their origins, the investigators said.\nIdentification cards found on as many as 15 percent of the victims link them to Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. The clothing reinforces that those found in the graves were Kurds, Nivala said.\nMany were wearing their best clothes, or multiple layers, as if told they would be relocating, he said.\nSaddam and Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as "Chemical Ali," are the main defendants facing charges for the Anfal campaign.\nInvestigators called the mass graves evidence of "a widespread and systematic crime, committed over a long time, we think with the knowledge and direction of high-level members of the regime."\nAt least some things were known about the mass graves and those buried there, the investigators said.\nSixty-three percent of the victims were children or teens under 18 years of age. Ten were clearly infants. It may have been a rainy day when they were shot dead, sinking into the mud after they were struck down. They were killed with bursts of fire from AK-47s, the Russian-designed automatic rifle.