BAGHDAD, Jan 6: Distraught relatives collected the bodies of 18 Iraqi construction workers at a Baghdad hospital on Thursday who had been murdered in the north of the country, where they had been lured with the promise of lucrative jobs.

The victims, aged between 16 and 42, were driven by poverty in their village of Bayda in the relatively peaceful southern province of Zi Qar to seek work in the violence-riven capital.

The men, who were almost all related, were then promised employment on a US base in the north. "Their bodies were found on Wednesday in the Mosul region," an interior ministry official said, adding that the dead had been recruited by a man offering work in the area.

"They were taken to Nineveh province on December 8," said the official. One of the bereaved said relatives worried by a lack of news had themselves gone north to discover their fate after the interior ministry in Baghdad failed to provide them with information.

"In Mosul, someone told us about the discovery of bodies in Sahaji and we went there," said Naim Hussein Farhan Khafaji. At the village outside Mosul they found their relatives, all of them killed with a bullet to the head, according to medical sources.

Sahaji inhabitants helped the bereaved load the bodies into a pickup truck to be driven back to Baghdad. Khafaji, who lost a brother in the massacre, said two drivers from Baghdad's deprived Shiite-dominated district of Sadr City had also been killed, but that their bodies had yet to be found.

While the interior ministry official said he did not know exactly who had lured the men north, according to Khafaji friends of the dead said "a contractor called Amad Mohsen Uda al-Rikabi offered these workers a job." -AFP