The line of about 50 male relatives in the courtyard never seems to diminish, and the yard itself is full of empty coffins awaiting their grisly load. Murder is booming in Baghdad, and some mortuary staff say that their workload has doubled in the past month.

The latest prominent targets to be shot yesterday in Baghdad were Sheikh Mijbil al-Sheikh Issa and Dhamin Ileywi, two Sunni members of the committee that is writing the constitution. They were killed with a third Sunni, a committee adviser, as they left a restaurant after lunch.

Yesterday in London figures were published estimating that more than 25,000 civilians have been killed and 42,000 wounded in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003. A report by Iraq Body Count, an activist group, and Oxford Research Group, claimed the death toll for the 12 months to the end of March was 11,351, almost double the toll for the previous year.

About 20 per cent of the victims were women and children, according to the report, which is based on media reports, mortuary and medical witness statements, and official Iraqi ministry statements. American-led forces were blamed for 37 per cent of the deaths, “criminals” for 36 per cent and anti-occupation forces for 9 per cent. The balance could not be attributed to any single group.

Most of the killings slip by virtually unnoticed, almost routine in a country where death is so commonplace. Of the 23 people killed yesterday in scattered shootings, 13 died in an attack on a bus carrying Iraqi workers to an American army base northeast of the city. Most of the dead are brought to one of Baghdad’s main hospitals for a post-mortem examination, then taken by families for burial, mainly in the giant Shi a cemetery in Najaf to the south.

At the central mortuary, camphor is thrown into coffins to disguise the stench of death. But at Yarmouk hospital, where the aged refrigerators frequently break down, the marsh-gas reek makes even veteran mortuary workers hold their noses as they hose down the yard after bodies are collected by relatives.

Muhammed Fahmi al-Samarrai, a Sunni businessman, came to the central mortuary to pick up his younger brother Zakariah, a captain in the police who until the day before had guarded the building maintained by the United Nations in Baghdad. The young officer phoned his wife when he left work the day before, accompanied by three cousins, also police officers, acting as bodyguards because they did not trust their fellow officers. Fifteen minutes later when his wife called his mobile phone, there was no answer.

When a person vanishes in Baghdad, relatives desperately check the hospitals. If that fails, they trawl the mortuaries. Mr al-Samarrai found his brother’s body there, a bullet hole in the head and one in his chest, and scars where somebody had tortured him with an electric drill before he was put to death. He blamed police officers acting on orders of the Shia-dominated Government, hoping to purge the police of Sunni officers. But he said he does not blame the Shia, and will not seek revenge. Instead, he accuses the Government of being in thrall to Iran — where many of the Shia parties spent decades in exile and where some built powerful militias — and Syria, which allows foreign jihadists to cross into Iraq.

Near by, Hisham Ali al- Hashimi, a Shia football player, was collecting the body of his own brother, Hussein. He had been shot 30 times in the street. His only crime, according to his brother, was to pray publicly at a Shia mosque in an area of Baghdad where sectarian revenge killings are rife.

Sectarian strife is still a taboo subject in a country where everyone knows the consequences of a full-blown civil war would be too dire to countenance.

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