The two victims were among four US civilian contractors killed in a brutal ambush in this hotbed town of anti-coalition activity west of Baghdad. Boiling with anger, demonstrators strung the bodies of two of the victims from a bridge straddling the Euphrates River, let them hang and hurled rocks at the corpses. “Down with the occupation, down with America,” the crowd shouted. The bodies, one of them headless, were then pulled down and placed on the ground for people to kick and slash with knives. Four policemen in a car who were near the bridge at the time were seen leaving the scene without intervening. Witness Ali Mohammed, 31, said the convoy was made up of three cars. “One of the cars managed to escape by speeding off. The second one was hit and the third tried to make a U-turn, but more armed men opened fire on it from the other side of the road,” he said. The two vehicles burst into flames and as the flames died down men pulled one of the bodies out, laid it on the ground and mutilated it with shovels, hacking off parts and shouting “long live Islam”. The orgy of violence coincided with the death of five US soldiers yesterday when a roadside bomb hit their convoy in the western province of Al-Anbar where Fallujah is located.
