Twenty beheaded bodies were discovered today on the banks of the Tigris River southeast of Baghdad and a car bomb killed another 20 people in one of the capital's busy outdoor bus stations, police said.
Relatives cry as they transport the bodies of policemen.
The beheaded remains were found in the Sunni Muslim village of Um al-Abeed, near the city of Salman Pak, which lies 14 miles southeast of Baghdad.
The bodies — all men aged 20 to 40 — had their hands and legs bound, and some of the heads were found next to the bodies.
The victims' identities were unknown, but they were found in an area where Shia travellers have been kidnapped and killed in the past, en route to the Shia-dominated provinces of Wasit, Maysan and Basra.
A bomb in a parked car ripped through a crowded transport hub in southwest Baghdad's Baiyaa neighborhood at morning rush hour, killing at least 20 people and wounding more than 50, another officer said on the same condition.
Many of the victims had been lining up for buses, awaiting a lift to work. Some 40 minibuses were incinerated, police said.
Baiyaa is a mixed area with a Shia majority, but it is also the main commercial center of a Sunni-dominated part of Baghdad on the west bank of the Tigris River. It is one of a string of neighborhoods just south of the main road to Baghdad International Airport where sectarian tensions have been running high.
AP Television News video showed a square strewn with smoldering car parts and charred bodies with clothes in tatters. Bystanders, some weeping, gingerly loaded human remains into ambulances.
Also today, the British military said three British soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb in southern Iraq.
The bomb exploded near the soldiers' vehicle last night southeast of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, the military said in a statement. Another soldier was wounded in the blast and remains in stable condition at a military hospital, it said.
The death raised to at least 154 the number of British troops killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.
Mortar bombs also hit the commercial area of Shorja in central Baghdad, killing at least two people and wounding 14 today.
Agencies