NAJAF, May 4: Iraqis clawed or shovelled through a mass grave on Sunday to uncover the remains of dozens of people, some with blindfolds and hands tied, who appeared to have been executed in a 1991 Shia uprising.

Rotting clothes held together little more than skeletons or bones. Witnesses watched them being extracted from the site, about 20 km north of Najaf, then wrapped in white sheets with their plastic-coated identity cards tied on.

By the end of the day, 47 bundles of remains had been reburied in unmarked graves.

Jawbones, thigh or arm bones and skulls with patches of hair jutted from the soil. They wore civilian clothes and shoes.

Combs, coins and watches lay among them, along with bullet casings. Yellow twine coated with a coppery crust, which the diggers thought was blood, bound some of their wrists.

“This is one, this is one,” said an Iraqi man who helped to dig, pointing out bones and clothes still embedded in the dirt. Whenever a full corpse appeared to have been retrieved and was placed on a white sheet, one worker, Alwan Khudayr, dipped his hands into the dirt and then patted down the remains to dust them with earth in a burial ritual. At a second site nearby, a skull with a red and white scarf tied around the eye sockets was found. Another skull lay near it.—Reuters