“WILL all those from the Sha’ab district come forward?” a policeman shouted from the doorway of the mortuary.

A group of Sunni men detached themselves from the crowd in the yard and shuffled towards him over the blood-stained ground. The hopeless among them wept and cursed. Others, clinging to the belief that their missing relatives were somehow still alive, stood in ashen-faced silence.

Sporadically a spasm of rage ran through the crowd and accusations were yelled at the gate of the yard, where a checkpoint of police commandos stared dispassionately at the crowd, blaring Shia “latmia” music through the loudspeakers on their vehicles as if in triumph.

Atta Dulaimi, 57, was one of those from the Sha’ab district of Baghdad, a mixed area in the northeast of the capital, who moved towards the mortuary door.

The Sunni teacher’s son, Walid, had returned home to Iraq on Wednesday after nine months working in Syria. Hours after his return, as he sat talking with his family at his father’s house, gunfire and explosions erupted outside. A Shia militia unit was attacking the neighbourhood’s Sunni mosque, blasting it with rocketfire and bullets.

Seconds later gunmen dressed in black burst into Mr Dulaimi’s house. They dragged Walid out to the street where two pick-up trucks were waiting. His father stumbled out into the street after them. “It was no use. I couldn’t do anything. They were so aggressive. They took my son away and dragged away a neighbour’s son too,” Mr Dulaimi told The Times yesterday.

A balding, bespectacled man dressed in a shirt and jersey, he had no idea whether his son was one of the 127 corpses taken to the mortuary by midday yesterday after the night of killing by Shia death squads that followed the destruction of Samarra’s al-Askariya shrine.

Mr Dulaimi’s story was repeated time and time again by those in the waiting Sunni crowd: men dressed in black, armed and enraged, attacking mosques, dragging away Sunni men.

From Dora in southern Baghdad, to Sha’ab in the city’s north, teams of Shia killers had moved apparently unchallenged through the city, attacking Sunni mosques, rounding up and killing Sunni men, sometimes cheered on by soldiers at Iraqi army checkpoints.

The conduct of those soldiers should give pause to those in Britain and America who believe that the new Iraqi Army will be an impartial force capable of keeping order in the country so that coalition troops can withdraw.

Wednesday night’s murder spree showed them to be partisan at best, complicit at worse.

At dawn yesterday the fate of Baghdad’s missing Sunni males became clear.

They lay sprawled on rubbish dumps, beside railtracks, in abandoned factory yards and ditches.

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