RAMADI, Iraq - Iraqi security forces discovered the bodies of 19 people, all shot in the head or chest, near the restive Iraqi-Syrian border town of Qaim, a police source said in Ramadi.
"Nineteen bodies, including that of a woman, were discovered in Qaim with bullet wounds," the source said, adding the bodies were found in a village called Al-Rumana on the lush bank of the Euphrates River just outside Qaim.
"They could be Iraqi soldiers," the source said.
A local policeman, Muzahem Karbuli, said one of the bodies was identified as a policeman, who had gone missing a week earlier. He added the corpses, all of them dressed in civilian clothes, had been dead for a week.
Locals had notified police after they noticed a stench emanating from the river, Karbuli said.
The dead had wounds to the head and chest, said Dr. Hamdi al-Alussi at Qaim's general hospital.
Murders are regularly carried out in the restive province of Al-Anbar, the stronghold of the resistance of Islamists and Saddam Hussein loyalists in Iraq.
Qaim, where insurgents are suspected of regularly crossing into Iraq from Syria, is the site of regular clashes between rebels and US forces.
In the fall 2003, the local police station lost two police chiefs in less than a month, as one commander was assassinated and his replacement wounded in a mortar attack.
03/09/2005 08:53 GMT