Iraq

Two large mass graves reportedly discovered

LONDON - More mass graves have been found in two new locations in Iraq, together containing at least 4,000 bodies and perhaps as many as 15,000, human rights groups and a British news report said Tuesday.

If forensic experts confirm the findings, the mass graves at Hillah and the village of Muhammed Sakran would be the largest discovered since Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed in the U.S.-led war.

Residents using tractors and, later, their hands excavated bodies this week from graves in the central Iraqi town of Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad.

WASHINGTON - U.S. forces captured two men they believe were former officials in Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's administration, a regional Baath Party leader and the former culture minister, an unnamed Pentagon official said Tuesday.

The military is checking to confirm the men are Baath leader Fadil Mahmud Gharib and former culture minister Hammed Youssef Hammadi, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Gharib was a leader of the party in the provinces of Karbala and Babil south of Baghdad. He was No. 28 on the U.S. list of the 55 most wanted former Iraqi officials. The United States has captured nearly two dozen of them.

Hammadi was not on the top 55 list but could be an important source of information in tracking down artifacts looted or otherwise stolen during the war, the Pentagon official said.

MOSUL, Iraq - U.S. military specialists who have examined a looted trailer equipped with chemical vats and compressors believe with "a reasonable degree of certainty" that the crude equipment was a mobile biological weapons laboratory, the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq said Tuesday.

The trailer - listing and shorn of its tarpaulin covers, tires, hoses and other accessible parts - stands at the edge of the Al-Kindi Weapons Research and Development compound awaiting inspection by experts en route from the United States, said Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.

The stripped trailer is identical to one found two weeks ago near Irbil, 50 miles east of Mosul and just inside an autonomous zone controlled by ethnic Kurds. The Irbil vehicle's serial number suggested it was the first of a production line and the Mosul lab's number was the second in a presumed series, Petraeus said.

BAGHDAD - The interim Iraqi minister of health, picked just 10 days ago by the United States, resigned under fire Tuesday after he refused to repudiate the Baath Party of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein.

Controversy had raged around the minister, Ali Shnan al-Janabi, since his appointment. Hundreds of Iraqi doctors and nurses demonstrated last week against Janabi, the ministry's third-ranking official under Hussein, and he dodged reporters' questions about his opinions of the country's former rulers.

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