NAJAF, Aug 27: At least 25 charred and bloated bodies were discovered on Friday in the basement of a religious court set up by radical leader Moqtada Sadr in Najaf, but confusion reigns over how they died.

Police said they were executed by militiamen, but Sadr's aides said they were Mehdi Army fighters killed during the past three weeks of combat and taken to the court for safekeeping before burial.

In the morning, two photographers saw militiamen carry blanket-clad bodies from Tussi and Sadek streets - where the frontline had been just a day earlier - to the courthouse in the Old City.

A photographer who entered the building with police in the afternoon saw, attached to the corpes laid out in the courtyard and basement, snippets of paper marked with names and the militia unit to which they seemingly belonged.

But a few hours later, police told journalists the bodies had been discovered in the basement of Moqtada Sadr's religious court in the Old City before being brought up to the courtyard by police and national guardsmen.

A horrific odour of death hung over the remains, their clothes soiled and muddy, a charred foot and hand thrust out of their blanket shroud. An array of beer cans littered the ground and a national guardsman said: "Look with your own eyes - they drank beer and then they killed."

But the first photographer to enter the building had seen no residue of alcohol. "We entered the building which was being used as Moqtada Sadr's court and we discovered in the basement a large number of bodies of police and ordinary civilians," said the deputy head of the Najaf police, General Amer Hamza al Daami.

"Some were executed, others were mutilated and others were burned." One witness, Rahri Hussein, said he was close to the mausoleum when "a young man asked everyone to come to the court building because he said he was tortured there and he was convinced that there were prisoners still being held in there.

"When we got down there we found only two people alive, the uncle of the police chief and a boy. The rest were just dead bodies." Adel al Jazairi, the uncle and driver of Najaf police chief Ghaleb al Jazairi, was kidnapped by militiamen on Aug 8. Sadr's religious courts operated outside Iraq's secular law and were denounced by the interim government. -AFP