Wednesday, March 31, 2004

BUSH BLOODBATH

You may not want to read through these details:

Residents mutilate ambush victims in horrific scenes at Iraqi hotspot

Furious Iraqis hacked up the charred bodies of two people, believed to be foreign civilians, and hung the remains from a bridge after their car was ambushed, saying this rebellious Iraqi town would be the "cemetery" of US-led occupation forces.

"Down with the occupation, down with America," they shouted as they hurled rocks at the bodies, one of them headless, that dangled from the bridge over the Euphrates River, an AFP correspondent witnessed.

The bodies were then taken down and placed on the ground for people to kick them and slash with knives.

Young men also strung a severed hand and a leg on an electricity pole on the main street of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, where the attack took place early Wednesday....


--AFP

Ah, but surely the brave men of our new Iraqi police force stepped in to restore order, right?

Four policemen in a car who were near the bridge at the time were seen leaving the scene without intervening.

There's a slightly different but equally horrific version of the story from AP:

Jubilant residents yanked the bodies of four foreigners — one a woman, at least one an American — out of their burning cars Wednesday, dragged the charred corpses through the streets, and hung them from the bridge spanning the Euphrates River.

That's in addition, of course, to these incidents:

...five American troops died when their military vehicle ran over a bomb in a separate incident ... in Malahma, 12 miles northwest of Fallujah....

In nearby Ramadi, insurgents threw a grenade at a government building and Iraqi security forces returned fire Wednesday....

Also in Ramadi, a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. convoy, witnesses said. U.S. officials in Baghdad could not confirm the attack.

On Tuesday in Ramadi, one U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded in a roadside bombing, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt.

Northeast of Baghdad, in the city of Baqouba on Wednesday, a suicide bomber blew up explosives in his car when he was near a convoy of government vehicles, wounding 14 Iraqis and killing himself....

On Tuesday, a suicide bombing outside the house of a police chief in Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, killed the attacker and wounded seven others.

A bomb exploded late Tuesday in a movie theater that had closed for the night. Two bystanders were wounded by flying glass....

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