MOSUL, 29 March 2007 — Gunmen massacred 70 men in an overnight rampage in revenge for bombings that killed 85 people in an ethnically mixed Iraqi town that US President George W. Bush once hailed as a beacon of hope.

Iraqi army Brig. Gen. Khorshid Dosti said 70 people were shot dead in an unprecedented reprisal assault on the town of Tal Afar on Tuesday, while another 40 remained missing and 30 more were wounded.

“We received 45 bodies of handcuffed and blindfolded men from Al-Wahada neighborhood overnight. They were killed yesterday just after the bomb,” a hospital doctor had told AFP earlier in the day.

The mass shooting and lethal bombings underscore the raging sectarian warfare that continues to grip the country, alongside a Sunni insurgency against the Shiite-led government and its US backers.

The massacre of men, believed to all have been Sunni Arabs, was in revenge for bomb attacks that killed 85 people and wounded 183 in Shiite districts of the mixed town on Tuesday.

The town is witnessing its worst violence since Bush in March 2006 held up the onetime militant stronghold as a model for efforts to create a stable Iraq.

In the deadliest blast, a suicide bomber tricked soldiers into believing he was delivering food supplies to a Shiite area where he detonated his cargo of explosives in a crowd of waiting men and women.

Lt. Col. Mohammed Ahmed Salah, a spokesman for the Iraqi Army in the provincial capital of Mosul confirmed there had been a “reprisal act.”

“A violent incident happened (on Tuesday) and a reprisal act happened in Al-Wahada, which is in the south of the town, just after the bombings,” he said.

“The situation is under control right now and we have started an investigation into the incident.” The Iraqi army has slapped a strict curfew on the town, deployed armored vehicles in the city center and banned even police from moving, an official said.

The style of the revenge killings, with the victims handcuffed and blindfolded, suggested they were the work of Shiite militias, which have carried out a wave of such attacks against Sunnis in the capital.

The US military said Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki had formed a committee composed of defense and Interior Ministry officials to investigate the Tal Afar attacks.

In other violence, 12 people were killed yesterday.

Two Iraqi policemen died in attacks on a local government building in the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah in western Iraq. Truck bombs loaded with chlorine gas were used, officials said.

A civilian was also wounded in an attack, which targeted a joint Iraqi-US center.

US First Lt. Shawn Mercer told AFP from Fallujah that two suicide truck bombers exploded chlorine gas near the building.

Insurgents loyal to Al-Qaeda have a strong presence in Al-Anbar province, which has seen a spate of attacks using chemical bombs, especially chlorine, against security forces and civilians.

In another car bombing, two people were killed and 20 wounded in Al-Iman, near the town of Al-Mahawil south of Baghdad. Elsewhere eight more people were killed. US officials meanwhile announced the deaths of two more servicemen and a government contractor in Iraq.

The contractor, a US citizen, died on Tuesday after being wounded by rocket fire near the US Embassy in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone the previous day, US Charge D’Affaires Daniel Speckhard said.

One of the soldiers was killed in a separate indirect fire attack in the Green Zone, the military said.

Insurgents have stepped up rocket attacks on Green Zone, US military spokesman said yesterday. US military spokesman Rear Adm. Mark Fox told reporters that the attacks on the Green Zone showed “desperation” on the part of insurgents following the security clampdown in Baghdad.

“It’s clear that there has been increasing targeting (of) attacks against the international zone,” Fox told a† news conference in Baghdad. Asked if any particular group was responsible, Fox said they came from various sources. We’re obviously taking some very careful steps and also scrutinizing the points of origin and the nature of any of the patterns,” he said.

The latest deaths brought to 3,237 the US military’s losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.