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Iraq accused of executing 26 prisoners

CAIRO: The exiled Iraqi Communist Party accused the Iraqi government on Sunday of executing 26 prisoners including 14 Kurds for opposition activity.

Iraqi authorities could not immediately be reached for comment about the alleged executions, said to have taken place in December. The Communist Party named all the alleged victims.

"In Makasib prison, alongside the road connecting Baghdad to its international airport, 14 Kurdish citizens from the cities of Sulaimaniya and Kirkuk were executed by firing squad on December 1, 1999," the party said in a statement faxed from London to Reuters in Cairo.

"Party sources have reported that the victims had been in detention in the regime's prisons for nearly nine years, charged with participating in the popular uprising of March 1991. Some of them were very old, and most of them had been ill and were in a wretched state," said the statement.

It said 12 others from the Baghdad districts of Umara and Al Thawra were executed on December 7 in Abu Ghraib prison, west of the Iraqi capital. The statement quoted party sources as saying the victims had been sentenced to death on charges of opposition to Baghdad and involvement in resistance action.

"Not a single week has passed without at least one of these notorious prisons hosting an orgy of mass executions with yet more innocent people being physically liquidated," it said.

It urged Arab, Islamic and international organisations to put pressure on Iraq and "prevent them from committing further crimes" while ensuring implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 688, which calls for Iraq to respect human rights.

The London-based human rights group Amnesty International said in a report in November that torture, summary executions and expulsions were among human-rights abuses systematically employed by Iraqi security forces.

The report said most victims of "relentless repression" were Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq and districts of Baghdad, or Kurds in the north of the country.-Reuters