BAGHDAD, 27 December 2005 — The discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of 150 people in the southern city of Karbala was made public yesterday as several insurgent attacks in Baghdad and its vicinity killed up to 18 people. Sources from the sewerage administration authority in Karbala, 100 kilometers south of the capital, said the skeletons of 150 people were discovered in the eastern district of Al-Abbasiya during maintenance work. The men, women and children whose remains were discovered are thought to have been executed in 1991 following a Shiite uprising.
Meanwhile, a shootout yesterday between Iraqi police and gunmen in Bahraz, 60 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, left 11 dead and three injured, witnesses said. Insurgents opened fire on a checkpoint manned by Iraqi police killing five policemen. Three policemen were injured in the attack in which six gunmen were also killed.
Witnesses, however, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur earlier that one of the explosions in Baghdad’s Al-Karada neighborhood killed two policemen and one civilian, and that a fourth car bomb in the Al-Azamiyah neighborhood injured several policemen.
In a separate incident, an Iraqi professor of fine arts, Nofal Ahmed, was shot to death by insurgents near his home in a northern Baghdad neighborhood. About 30 kilometers south of Baghdad, gunmen opened fire on a cargo truck in Al-Mahmodiya, killing two Iraqi civilians, a police source said.
Some 45 kilometers south of the capital, on the road between Mahmoudiya and Latifiya, an attack on chief of police of the city of Hillah killed one of his guards and injured three others, said Latifaya police sources. Three roadside bombs exploded as the convoy of Brig. Gen. Qais Hamza al-Mamouri passed by. He survived the incident, one of several he faced over the past 10 days.
Latifiya police also said yesterday that they had discovered the blindfolded and bound corpses of four Iraqi men who appeared to have been killed by gunshots. One of the men was a policemen, while the identities of the others were unknown.
On the political front, Iraqis who voted abroad in parliamentary elections favored the Kurdish list of President Jalal Talabani, according to preliminary results announced yesterday.
The Kurdish Coalition took 36 percent of the 482,000 votes cast abroad and in early voting domestically by soldiers, police, hospital patients and prisoners, said Farid Ayar, spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq.
In second position was the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, of which Prime Minister Ibrahim Al-Jaafari is a member, which won 30 percent of the votes. Ayar emphasized that the results were merely preliminary and that 31,000 votes were still being scrutinized.
