http://www.nysun.com/article/28079?page_no=1
At Least 111 Dead In Violence After Mosque Attack
By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS - Associated Press
February 23, 2006
excerpts:
The hardline Sunni Clerical Association of Muslim Scholars said 168 Sunni mosques had been attacked around the country, 10 imams killed and 15 abducted since the shrine attack. The Interior Ministry said it could only confirm figures for Baghdad, where it had reports of 19 mosques attacked, one cleric killed and one abducted.
The bullet-ridden bodies of a prominent female correspondent and two other journalists who had been covering Wednesday's explosion in Samarra were found on the outskirts of the city.
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A spokesman for the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars blamed the violence on the country's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and other Shiite religious leaders who called for demonstrations against the shrine attack.
Abdul-Salam Al-Kubaisi also said U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad may also have enflamed the situation when he warned Monday that the United States would not continue to support institutions run by sectarian groups with links to armed militias. Sunnis accuse Shiite militiamen operating in the ranks of the Interior Ministry, which controls the police, of widespread abuses.
"Without doubt, these statements mobilized all the Shiites," al-Kubaisi said. "It made them ready to go down to the street at any moment."
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Thursday that he suspects Al-Qaida in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was responsible for the mosque attack.
"It has the hallmarks of their nihilism," Straw told a news conference in London. He called on leaders of Iraq's religious communities to defuse tensions caused by the attack.
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In Diyala, a religiously mixed province northeast of Baghdad, 47 bodies were found in a ditch. Officials said the victims appeared to have been stopped by gunmen, forced out of their cars and shot in an industrial area near Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. Most were aged between 20 and 50 and appeared to include both Sunnis and Shiites, police said.
Dozens more bodies were found dumped at sites in Baghdad and the Shiite heartland in southern Iraq, many of them with their hands bound and shot execution-style.