Bodies of young men found in Iraq

The bodies of 10 young men shot in the head or chest were found near a disused factory in the Iraqi capital, security and morgue official said.

The men, whose corpses were recovered close to a former pharmaceuticals plant at Mahamel near the Shiite Sadr City district, were aged between 17 and 25 and had been dead for up to two days, an army source said on Thursday.

Summary executions were commonplace in Baghdad at the height of the Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict in 2006 and 2007, when many thousands of people were killed in cold blood.

But this was the first time in several years that such a large number of bodies had been found in one place.