27 Corpses Discovered in Iraq

BAGHDAD — Iraqi soldiers near the Iranian border discovered the bound bodies of 27 people in civilian clothes who had been shot in the head, the latest in a series of suspected political killings, officials said Thursday.

Human rights workers and families of victims suspect that death squads from either the Shiite Muslim majority or the Sunni Arab minority have been executing political or sectarian enemies. Bodies have turned up in rivers, back streets and refuse pits in recent months, and the killers are almost never found. The number of victims found so far is in the hundreds.

The announcement of the discovery in the town of Jassan, about 80 miles southeast of Baghdad, came the same day a car bomb detonated among a group of men outside an Iraqi army recruiting center in Tikrit. The explosion killed seven people and wounded 13, police Capt. Hakim Azawi said.

The recruits were former army officers responding to a recent initiative by the Iraqi government inviting members of the military ranked major and below to reenlist to provide leadership.

One former general said the officers had already been interviewed and were waiting outside the compound as they had been told when the bomber struck.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a U.S. military spokesman, told reporters in Baghdad on Thursday that an American-Iraqi operation to root out insurgents in the border town of Husaybah that began over the weekend had ended. Thirty-seven insurgents were killed, he said, and U.S. forces lost one member. About 185 people are being held. Fifteen of the slain insurgents were foreign fighters, he said.

Also in Baghdad, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw met with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari in a marble villa inside the heavily fortified Green Zone compound. Straw condemned recent militant acts and joined Jafari in criticizing Syria for not doing more to stop the flow of insurgents and weapons into Iraq.

In Kirkuk, Hatam Mahdi Hassani, brother of Iraqi National Assembly Speaker Hachim Hassani, was reported abducted Thursday by gunmen in army uniforms.

Hachim Hassani, a moderate Sunni Arab technocrat, spent most of his adult life in the United States and returned to Iraq after the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein in 2003 to help rebuild the country. Before that, he was a resident of Claremont, where he had an investment business.

He took on the post of National Assembly speaker after other Sunni Arab candidates declined to do so, in part because of the risk to themselves and their families.