THE GRAVEDIGGER cursed the blazing midday sun, the dust and the flies as he began the task of reburying Saddam Hussein’s victims, whose skeletal remains had waited 12 years to find a final resting place.

There was little ceremony and no prayer. The burial site, near the main cemetery in Najaf, had clearly served as a parking lot until it was redesignated the “Cemetery to Saddam’s Martyrs” yesterday.

But there was some dignity as the remains of the 50 people, discovered over the weekend by American forces and local groups, were neatly tied in white shrouds, carefully laid into the shallow graves and each marked with a broken piece of breeze block or a large stone. Most of the impromptu mourners were left wondering if a missing relative might not be in one of those small bundles.

“When we heard about the graves, we decided to come and see if one of our relatives might be here,” said Tawash Ali, from the town of Sawara, who lost five members of his family in the purges of southern Iraq after the uprising against Saddam by the country’s Shia Muslims in 1991.

“This is the tip of the iceberg,” Captain Mike Urena, a US Marine officer, helping to co-ordinate the excavations, said. “There will be more.”

“I know that these murders happened more than 11 years ago, because that is when I bought the land off the government,” Medhi Abdul Hussein said. He had planned to farm it until he noticed pieces of clothing and bone protruding through the topsoil. He then saw packs of wild dogs digging on the site. He knew at once what was on his land.

• The Ministry of Defence launched an investigation last night into the “unfortunate and tragic” shooting of a boy in Basra, amid reports he had been shot by a British soldier. The boy, 14, was playing and laughing with a soldier near a school used by troops from the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, a BBC journalist in southern Iraq reported.

  Captain Crispian Cuss, a British Army spokesman in Basra, said initial inquiries had shown that the incident was “in no way malicious”. “It appears to have been a very unfortunate accident,” he said.

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