Iraq Gunmen Seize 24 People, Killing 20

Local Iraqi shop owners gather around the site of a suicide bomber's attack, Wednesday, July 12, 2006, in Baghdad, Iraq. A suicide bomber blew himself up in a restaurant in Baghdad on Wednesday, killing seven people and wounding 31, police said. (AP Photo/Samir Mizban) (Samir Mizban - AP)

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Gunmen stormed a bus station Wednesday northeast of Baghdad, seizing 24 people and killing all but four of them, authorities said. An Iraqi general said the victims were Shiites, but police said their identities were unclear.

The gunmen arrived in several cars at the bus station in Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad, about 6 a.m., forced the captives into four vehicles they commandeered at the scene and sped away, officials said.

Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Awad, the commander of the Iraqi army's 5th division, told government television that 20 bodies were later found and the victims were Shiites. He said four people were rescued.

Al-Awad said the attackers separated the Shiites from the Sunnis, then took the Shiites to the nearby village of Ballour. He said nearly 400 Iraqi soldiers raided the village and rescued the four survivors. The other captives had already been moved to the area where the bodies were found, he said. Al-Awad accused local police of failing to intervene.

But police said the identities had not been determined and they didn't know whether all the dead were Shiites. The Muqdadiyah area has a slight Sunni majority and is located in a province where sectarian tension runs high.

The massacre is part of a surge in sectarian violence that began Sunday when Shiite gunmen rampaged through a Baghdad neighborhood killing Sunnis. At least 60 people were killed Tuesday across Iraq, most of them in the Baghdad area.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki warned that sectarian unrest was threatening the future of the nation.

"We all have the last chance to reconcile and agree among each others on avoiding conflict and blood. If we fail, God forbid, I don't know what the fate of Iraq will be," al-Maliki said during an address to parliament.

The United States had hoped that a unity government of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds could calm sectarian tensions and convince insurgents to lay down their arms so that U.S. and its coalition partners could begin withdrawing troops starting this year.

But more than 1,607 Iraqis have been killed and nearly 2,500 wounded since al-Maliki's unity government took office May 20, according to an Associated Press count.

The top U.S. commander in Iraq said that "terrorists and death squads" are mainly responsible for a surge in sectarian violence in the capital, and he pledged to provide whatever U.S. forces are needed to avert civil war.

Gen. George Casey, at a joint news conference with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, told reporters that al-Qaida is carrying out terrorist killings in the Baghdad area in an attempt to "demonstrate that they are still relevant" after the June 7 killing of their leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.