Bodies pile up in Baghdad morgue as murder rate touches new high

Grieving women wailed and beat their heads at the back door of the Baghdad coroner's office yesterday, waiting for the bodies of their murdered loved ones to be released for burial.

At regular intervals, the blue metal door creaked open and another corpse was handed over to be laid in one of the rough wooden coffins strapped to the roofs of waiting taxis.

Inside, amid the stench of death, coroners worked flat out, their daily caseload more than tripled by postwar Iraq's violent crime wave.

The bodies of some 35 Iraqis who met violent or suspicious deaths pas-sed through Baghdad's Institute of Forensic Medicine yesterday, a typical daily toll in the capital since the U.S.-led war which deposed Saddam Hussain in April.

Most of the bodies had gunshot wounds in a city where law and order has broken down and automatic rifles or pistols are must-have items in nearly every household.

"Before the war, we would see maybe ten cases a day," said the institute's director Dr Faik Amin Bakir. "Now it is three or four times that and nearly all because of shootings. It's a new situation, a terrible situation."

Armed gangs of looters roam the streets, killing those who stand in their way. Revenge killings are also common as people settle old scores in the knowledge that murders are likely to go unpunished. Some Iraqis have been shot dead by American soldiers, and some by their own police.

Baghdad's murder rate eclipses that of other major cities. New York, whose former police chief Bernard Kerik is tasked with revamping the Iraqi police force, last year recorded around 48 homicides per month, barely more than the daily murder rate in Baghdad.

Even notoriously violent Rio de Janeiro cannot ma-tch Baghdad for murders, averaging 12 a day last year.

His eyes wet with tears, Jabar Hussain sat on the kerbside waiting for the body of his 26-year-old son Salim who was shot dead just after dawn in the impoverished district of Sadr City.

"He was just going to work. We don't know why it happened," said Jabar, staring at the ground. "There is shooting all the time. No one can stop it." The city's police say they are trying their best in the most dangerous of circumstances.

Ghazwan Whalid came to collect the body of his colleague Lieutenant Ah-med Haider, killed with another policeman on Wedn-esday while trying to apprehend a gang of robbers on a busy Baghdad street.

"Every day a policeman is killed in Baghdad," he said. "Every day I say goodbye to my wife and fear I will not see her again."

Those criminals who are arrested by police are taken to detention facilities set up by U.S. forces. But with Iraq's judicial system in chaos, many are simply kicked back out on to the streets after just a few weeks. "The Americans jail them and after 20 days release them," Whalid said. "Then they'll find us and take their revenge."

Current crime situation is in stark contrast to pre-war era when law and order violations was deal with an iron hand.