Police find eight heads north of Baghdad

BAQUBA, Iraq, June 3 (Reuters) Police found the severed heads of seven cousins and a mosque Imam near the town of Baquba today, a gruesome discovery even by Iraq's standards.

Small paper notes left with the heads and read by ambulance workers identified one as Sheikh Abdel Aziz al-Mashhadani, the Imam of a Sunni Arab mosque near Baghdad. The note accused him of killing four Shi'ite physicians.

Like so many others, the eight were victims of sectarian violence that has pushed Iraq towards civil war.

Three weeks ago the family of the seven cousins received a telephone call saying a relative had an accident and needed blood and was laying in a Shi'ite-run hospital, a relative said.

''Seven cousins went to save him and that's the last we saw of them,'' said the relative.

Ambulance workers took the heads from an area beside a road and placed them in banana crates for transport to a Baquba hospital.

As the heads were being unloaded from a hospital vehicle, a policeman made a prediction that is common after many attacks.

''This is aimed at stirring sectarian feelings. This will cause a lot of violence,'' he said.

REUTERS SHB VV1801