IRAQ: Women and children butchered by Saddam Hussein have been excavated from a mass grave near a northern Iraqi village by a US-led team seeking to prosecute the former dictator for crimes against humanity.
Investigators found two trenches outside the village of Hatra in northern Iraq containing 300 bodies believed to be Kurds killed in 1987 during the brutal al-Anfal campaign.
Seven other trenches had yet to be opened.
In one grave, investigators working for the Iraqi Special Tribunal found the bodies of pregnant women and infants holding toys. Women had been blindfolded and shot in the back of the head, investigators said.
In another trench men had been herded together and mowed down by machine-gun fire.
"This is a killing field," said Mr Greg Kehoe, an American working with the tribunal.
"Someone used this field on significant occasions over time to take bodies up there, and to take people up there and execute them." Investigators are seeking evidence to try Saddam Hussein and other leading Ba'athists for crimes against humanity.
Since July 5th, investigators from the tribunal have been compiling evidence from documents seized after the fall of Saddam's regime, first-hand accounts and mass graves already unearthed.
Human rights groups say the former regime killed an estimated 250,000 Shia Muslims and 50,000 ethnic Kurds. Forty mass graves have been identified by the Iraqi government.
The mass grave at Hatra is the first site where the US-led team has conducted a full scientific examination. Similar sites in southern and central Iraq were unearthed by grieving Iraqis shortly after the fall of Saddam, and their bodies reburied.
At Hatra, 120 bodies have been exhumed and will now undergo forensic examination. That is enough, say investigators, to piece together the terrible final moments of an entire community put to death on Saddam's orders.
In late 1987, at the height of the al-Anfal campaign, Iraqi troops rounded up hundreds of Kurds from villages around Lake Dokan in northern Iraq.
They were driven south to a deserted wadi two miles from the village of Hatra. The trenches would already have been dug at the base of the valley in preparation for their arrival. The women, apparently not realising their fate, had brought with them cooking utensils and spare clothes.
"We're finding lots of items contained in the clothing," said Ms Jessica Mondero, examining corpses in the morgue. "Lots of children's clothing, medication, beads, money, change purses layered within the clothing."
The women were blindfolded and then systematically executed with pistol shots to the head before their bodies were bulldozed into the pits.
The body of one woman was found clutching a baby. The infant had been shot in the back of the head, the woman in the face, the mother's severed hand found in the child's blanket.
Foetus bones were also found amongst the corpses.
"The youngest foetus we have was 18 to 20 foetal weeks," said US investigating anthropologist Mr P. Willey. "Tiny bones, femurs - thigh bones - the size of matchsticks."
The men were brought to the killing field on a different day, investigators believe. They were tied together, half with their hands before them, half with them behind.
Saddam's thugs then opened fire with machine-guns. The bodies of the men still lie in one corner, where investigators believe they stumbled en masse as the firing began in a vain attempt to escape.
"Once the shooting begins, people begin to wince and move, and that's when you get the odd person here or there who will have a stranger trajectory because they're hiding," said Mr Kehoe.
Spent machine-gun casings still litter the site.
The position of the graves at the bottom of a valley that floods in winter has meant that many of the corpses have remained partially preserved. Reporters at the site said the area still smelt as if the massacre had recently taken place.
"I've been doing grave sites for a long time, but I've never seen anything like this, women and children executed for no apparent reason," said Mr Kehoe, who spent five years investigating mass graves in Bosnia for the International Criminal Tribunal of Yugoslavia.
Mr Kehoe and the tribunal team of archaeologists, anthropologists and technicians have worked under a veil of secrecy at Hatra since September 1st for fear of terrorist attack.
They have nine other mass grave sites to examine, which they can do only one at a time and in areas removed from insurgent strongholds. It's a slow and painstaking process.
"We're putting a package together on each body removed - pictures of bones, clothes, a forensic report," said Mr Kehoe. "We're trying to meet international standards that have been accepted by courts throughout the world," he said. The tribunal is also working without the help of European investigators because they believe evidence might eventually be used to put Saddam Hussein to death.