Life during wartime

Locals drag body of foreigner through streets

Falluja, Iraq, March 31. Jubilant Iraqis dragged the burnt body of what appeared to be a foreigner through the streets of the volatile town of Falluja to day and threw stones at a corpse still inside a car engulfed with flames.

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Hacked to pieces

Witnesses said the contractors were passing through Falluja in two four-wheel-drive vehicles when gunmen opened fire.

An angry crowd descended on the cars, throwing stones and setting the vehicles ablaze. The corpses were dragged from the wreckage and television pictures showed one burnt body being kicked and stamped on, while at least two were tied to cars and driven through the city, witnesses said. Adults and children hacked the bodies to pieces, before lynching two of the charred remains from a bridge spanning the Euphrates River. "The people of Falluja hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep," said local resident Abdul Aziz Mohammed. One Iraqi held a sign underneath one of the lynched bodies which read: "Falluja is the cemetery for Americans".