Death for Qaida Militants in Iraq over 2006 Massacre

Iraq's top criminal court issued death sentences on Thursday against 15 al-Qaida militants for a 2006 wedding massacre in which 70 people were killed, a judicial spokesman said.

"The Central Criminal Court of Iraq today issued 15 death sentences," said Abdelsattar Birakdar.

He said the condemned, who have a month to appeal, included Firas Fleih, the reputed leader of a cell involved in a string of attacks, including the wedding massacre in which the victims were brutally killed.

"The prisoners are all Iraqis, and they have a month to appeal the sentences, after which the verdicts will go to the presidency for approval," Birakdar said.

On May 28, Iraqi authorities announced they had arrested 25 suspects for the wedding attack. Among them was Fleih, whom security forces claim posed as a human rights activist who had fought to improve prison conditions in a bid to elude capture.

Police said the worst attack the group had carried out was the systematic killing of a wedding party celebrating the marriage of a Shiite man and a Sunni woman in the town of Taji, north of Baghdad, before disposing of their bodies in the Tigris River.

The murders came as confessional violence was raging throughout Iraq, with tens of thousands having died in 2006 and 2007 as a result of the brutal sectarian war.

Police said the insurgents first detonated a bomb across the road the party was traveling along, so as to force them to travel along a side street.

They separated the women, the men, and the children and raped all the women, then hung massive weights around the necks of the 15 children, who were aged between two and 12 years old, and threw them in the river to drown, according to police accounts.

The new bride was raped in front of her husband, and all the men in the wedding party were made to stand along a bridge crossing the river, with each receiving a single gunshot to the back of their head and their bodies being flung into the water with the force of the bullet.

The bride was slashed in the chest and left to bleed to death.

For Iraqis, the killings were shocking, even by the standards of the violence that has gripped the country since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion ousted the dictator Saddam Hussein.