Mass Graves

Two recently excavated mass graves containing the bodies of at least 38 people allegedly killed by Saddam Hussein's regime after a 1991 Shiite uprising in southern Iraq will probably provide key evidence for a third war crimes trial against the deposed Iraqi president. Skeletal remains were unceremoniously tangled together amid the dirt. Blindfolds and wrist ligatures were found on many of the remains.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich has called for an investigation into why the MTA was unable to detect a recently unearthed mass grave -- believed to belong mostly to Chinese immigrants who died a century ago -- before it began building an extension of the Gold Line through Boyle Heights last June.

They could not marry, they could not own property, and they performed the most undesirable jobs: ditch diggers, canal builders, house boys. They were banned from most shops and public institutions and were the target of racist violence that went unpunished.

Maintenance workers digging up a sewage pipe have discovered a grave holding at least 20 bodies, including those of women and children, in a park less than a mile from the southern Shiite city of Karbala. The bodies, found Monday, are believed to be those of people killed in the aftermath of a failed 1991 uprising against President Saddam Hussein. Human rights experts say Hussein may have killed as many as 300,000 Iraqi Shiite Muslims after the uprising.

Lebanese forces unearthed at least 20 decomposed corpses Saturday from a mass grave in an eastern town that was the headquarters of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon for three decades, security sources said. Witnesses and security sources said the remains, most now only skeletons in scraps of underwear, were found on an old onion farm in Anjar, long used by Syrian intelligence as a jail and interrogation center.

Rescue workers battled with little success Sunday to retrieve bodies buried under 40 feet of mud, while local officials and Maya residents complained bitterly that the federal response to the disaster was slow and inadequate. Nearly five days after Hurricane Stan triggered massive mudslides that devastated this region, wiping out the entire village of Panabaj and apparently killing hundreds of people, local officials struggled to supply food and shelter to the survivors.

Workers at a U.S. Army airfield in Stuttgart have uncovered a World War II-era grave believed to contain the bodies of 34 Jewish slave laborers used by the Nazis, German authorities said. The skeletal remains were found Monday, said Ulrich Heffner, a police spokesman. A police investigator said two or three of the victims may have been alive when buried.

U.N. forensic experts are exhuming bodies presumed to be Serbian from a mass grave in the town of Malisevo in Kosovo, the second such find in a month, officials said Saturday. "There are multiple remains of bodies and at least two complete bodies," said Marcia Poole, spokeswoman for the United Nations mission that has run the war-torn Serbian province since 1999. "They are presumed to be Serbs missing since 1998." A second U.N.

Two mass graves that appear to contain the remains of as many as 7,000 people killed by Saddam Hussein's government have been discovered in southern Iraq, an Iraqi government minister said Friday. The new government may use the finds to help build its case against alleged war criminals, including Hussein, Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin said.

Rwandans reburied the bodies of more than 20,000 victims of the 1994 genocide who had been dumped in mass graves, as the country marked the 11th anniversary of the massacre's beginning with a week of mourning. The reburials were a gesture meant to restore dignity to the victims of the genocide, in which more than 800,000 people died. The genocide started after a plane carrying the nation's president mysteriously crashed while landing April 6, 1994.