50 bodies found in Iraq

The bodies all bore bullet wounds and are most likely the victims of the sectarian dirty war raging in the capital between rival Sunni and Shia armed groups, a police official said.

The daily count of corpses showed a brief lull during a total curfew imposed on Baghdad on Saturday, but since it was lifted early Sunday levels of violence, including bombings, have returned to their previous levels.

On Sunday, police reported a mass kidnapping when armed men, some of them wearing security-style uniforms, stormed a food processing plant and kidnapped 26 people, four of whom subsequently escaped.

Gunmen, all wearing civilian clothes in three vehicles, raided the factory and rounded up all worker, known for making kibbeh, a kind of meatball, in Baghdad's lower income Amil neighbourhood.

In other violence, three soldiers from the Iraqi army's quick reaction force were killed in an ambush by gunmen early Monday near Kut city, southeast of Baghdad.

In the comparatively more secure south, Safa al-Ameed, director of the Sadr hospital was shot dead with his driver Sunday night in the Shia shrine city of Najaf.

Three marines died in separate incidents in Iraq's restive western province of Anbar, the US military reported on Monday.

Two of the marines were killed Sunday in enemy action while a third died in a "non-combat related" vehicle accident.

Iraq's vast, mostly desert, province of Anbar sees the majority of US casualties in Iraq.

The latest fatalities bring the number of US servicemen killed since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq by US-led forces to 2,712 according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.