Police raiding a suspected al Qaeda hide-out found a secret prison and the bodies of seven Iraqis bearing gunshot wounds and torture marks, Iraqi police said today.
Police said they believed the six men and one woman, only two of whom have so far been identified, had been kidnapped. There was no immediate comment from the US military.
Police arrested 11 suspected al Qaeda members in the raid on a house in Benat al-Hassan, on the outskirts of Samarra, early on Saturday, said Captain Muthana Shakir, commander of Iraq's Rapid Intervention Force in Samarra, 100 km (62 miles) north of Baghdad.
They found a room sealed by a door with bars in it, marked "Sijin" - Arabic for prison - and the tortured body of the woman, who had been shot, lay inside.
"We found munitions, weapons, and inside the prison, the woman's body; in another room, the bodies of six men," Shakir said, adding that all showed signs of torture and bullet wounds.
Shakir said it was in keeping with the Sunni Arab group's Islamist philosophy to separate women and men. One of the dead men was a lawyer, he added.
No prisoners were found alive at the house.
There were no clashes during the raid. Police found all suspects sleeping when they stormed the building.