Remains of almost 600 exhumed at Iraq massacre site
Iraq has so far exhumed the remains of 597 people believed to have been executed by jihadis in the so-called Speicher massacre, the human rights minister said Wednesday, AFP reports.
"The remains of 597 Speicher martyrs have been exhumed," Mohammad al-Bayati told journalists in Baghdad.
In June 2014, armed men belonging or allied to ISIS captured hundreds of young, mostly Shiite recruits from Speicher military base, near the northern city of Tikrit.
They were then lined up in several locations and executed, as shown in pictures and footage later released by ISIS.
Some were pushed into the Tigris river, others hastily buried in locations that were discovered when government and allied forces retook Tikrit from the jihadis in April.
The highest estimate for the number of people killed in one of the worst atrocities committed by IS stands at 1,700.