IRAQ: One by one the last victims of Saddam Hussein's regime, prisoners summarily shot through the head or chest as coalition forces attacked Baghdad, are being unearthed at this mass grave.
Rotting flesh still hanging to the bones, locks of hair and striped prison uniforms are set out on plastic sheets under the hot sun. The stench is nauseating. The killing here was recent, unlike at most of the mass graves uncovered so far in Iraq.
The sandy field on the banks of Diyala river was owned by the defunct intelligence services and lies next to a military camp.
It's a slow, painstaking process carried out by volunteers surrounded by a crowd eager for the slightest evidence of a lost father, brother, cousin or friend.
Mr Jassab Laibi (54) rushed here to try to find the body of his son, Ali, an army lieutenant accused of belonging to the banned "Free Officers" movement. Both men had been imprisoned in the sinister Abu Ghraib prison on the western edge of Baghdad. After Jassab was freed he lost touch with Ali.
Volunteers from the Al-Walaa human rights group run by the Shiite seminary Hawza, are clawing through the soil with their bare hands or with spades. A pair of flip-flops like those worn by Iraqi prisoners and an old shoe lie in the sand.
"An intelligence officer called Jamal was gunned down after asking for the execution of prisoners to be postponed at a moment when the regime was on the run," says one local resident, who refused to give his name.
Four corpses were dug up on Saturday. Dozens more remain in the ground. People who flocked to the site concur that about 150 people are buried in Madaen, 30 kilometres west of Baghdad.
"There are bullet wounds in the heads and chests of the bodies," says Mr Sattar Sheffi from Al-Walaa which is fronted by prominent Iraqi Shiite cleric Sheikh Qadhem Al-Fartusi.
The mass grave was found a few days after the end of the war when farmers saw dogs devouring unearthed bodies. Local people say they saw dozens of prisoners brought in aboard two trucks on April 4th and then executed.