THE bodies of 57 people allegedly taken hostage in a town on the outskirts of Baghdad have been pulled out of the River Tigris, President Talabani said yesterday.

Elsewhere, the corpses of 19 soldiers murdered by insurgents were found in a football stadium in a town in the “Sunni Triangle”.

The discovery of the alleged hostages’ remains was the latest twist in the confused tale of Madain, an ethnically mixed town 20 miles south of Baghdad, where Shia officials had accused Sunni extremists of taking up to 150 Shias hostage last Friday and threatening to kill them if the entire Shia community did not leave town.

Three brigades of Iraqi commandos were sent to Madain, which they entered without firing a shot and without finding any hostages. Interior Ministry officials accused the Shia bloc, which controls the Iraqi parliament, of making exaggerated claims of the threat to purge the ministries when they form a government.

However, Mr Talabani, a Kurdish former guerrilla, said that the bodies of the hostages had been found 20 miles downriver from Madain. Police identified and photographed them before burying them.

He said: “The terrorists committed crimes there, and it is not true that there were no hostages — there were. They were killed and they threw the bodies in the Tigris and more than 50 bodies have been brought out of the Tigris . . . We have the full names of those who were killed and of those criminals who committed those crimes.” Shia officials in the incoming government accused the security forces of ignoring the threat, which they said had amounted to ethnic cleansing.

Interior Ministry officials denied that more than a few hostages had been taken and said that those were abducted as part of a tribal feud.

A witness who claimed to have photographs of the bodies said that the victims’ hands had been tied behind their backs.

It was unclear how the kidnappers had taken their hostages out of the town as the Iraqi forces, backed by US troops, closed in on Sunday. Many local people also denied that there had been any mass hostage-taking at the time.

In Haditha, a Sunni town on the Euphrates to the northwest of Baghdad, officials said that 20 Iraqi off-duty soldiers had been captured by insurgents, taken to a football stadium and shot. One of the men survived, and was being treated in hospital. It was believed that the men were soldiers heading home for a public holiday today to mark the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.

Haditha is deep in the Sunni Triangle and has been the scene of numerous kidnappings of Iraqi security officials, who usually are murdered as an example to others not to join up.

The bodies were discovered as violence flared again in the capital. At least eight people died in a spree of bomb attacks and drive-by shootings.

A car bomb set a petrol tanker ablaze in an American army convoy. Another car bomb, in the Doura neighbourhood in southern Baghdad, missed a police convoy and blew up a civilian car, killing two Iraqis and wounding four.

In the sprawling Shia slum of Sadr City, a policeman was killed in a drive-by shooting. The sudden resurgence of violence has been blamed on the inability of the Shia and Kurdish victors of January’s elections to form a government, allowing rebels to regroup.

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