Mass Grave Full of Cab Drivers Found in Iraq
Victims were asked for a ride to Dujail, then killed for their cars.
| Posted Monday, Sept. 12, 2011, at 11:04 AM ET
Not just any old mass grave rates as big news in Iraq.
As the New York Times reports, authorities on Friday unearthed 40 bodies buried in a rural part of Dujail, north of Baghdad, and the find barely made headlines. But it turned out that this mass grave wasn’t like any of the others that accumulated around the country during Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule or the chaos that followed the American invasion. It’s full of cab drivers, apparently kidnapped and killed for their taxicabs over the past two years by a criminal gang.
Authorities said they began investigating when cab drivers from a garage in Baghdad complained that many of their colleagues were disappearing. It seems the gang members had established a routine of visiting the garage and asking a driver for a ride to Dujail. Arriving, they would be met by the rest of the gang members, who would kill the driver, dump him in the grave, take the car and sell it.
No explanation was given for why the suspects felt they needed to kill the drivers, the Times notes—though it stands to reason that if they lived, they might spread the word to their cohorts that anyone asking for a ride to Dujail is probably bad news. Nonetheless, the wanton violence speaks to the degree of lawlessness that persists in Iraq even as U.S. military deaths have steeply declined.
Three men have been arrested and confessed to the cab driver murders, an Iraqi interior ministry official told AFP.
The mass grave is not Dujail’s first, the Times points out. In fact, the town may be best known for a mass killing perpetrated by Hussein loyalists in 1982 after a failed assassination attempt there. The slaughter of 148 people was the one for which Hussein was hanged in 2006.
