LULWORTH: Surrounded by the tiny skulls and bones of children, Iraqi scientist Iyad labours under armed guard to unearth the grim truth from a mass grave. Bent double and wiping the sweat from his forehead, he works meticulously to remove the dirt caked on the skeletons. But this is no grim atrocity site in an Iraqi desert - it's Dorset, a genteel south west England county known for its rolling green hills and picturesque villages.

Iyad is one of 33 Iraqi scientists who have been trained in Britain to dig up the hundreds of thousands of bodies thought to have been dumped in mass graves across Iraq during the rule of Saddam Hussein.

They spent five months in Britain, working in laboratories and at a mock mass grave in Dorset, removing over 20 resin skeletons planted in the ground. Although Iyad was working under the safety and supervision of the Inforce forensic charity, he still found the experience immensely distressing.

"It makes you nervous, just thinking why you are here - to work on a mass grave," Iyad, which is not his real name, told Reuters before returning home. Inforce, a group of three highly experienced forensic scientists, arranged for the Iraqi archaeologists, anthropologists and police officers to come to Dorset to learn how to collect evidence from the grave. The project was funded by the British Foreign Office.

PAINFUL STORIES: The team know that although statistically unlikely, they could even discover the remains of members of their own family. "Some of them have very poignant stories, in some cases awful," In force chief executive Margaret Cox said.