Iraqi family's uncertainty finally laid to rest

By Waleed Ibrahim

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - For a year Professor Salam Sweidan's family has been both hoping and dreading that their phone would ring with some information about his fate.

The call came a week ago. Sweidan's body had been found, buried in a numbered grave for unidentified corpses in a cemetery in the holy Iraqi Shi'ite city of Kerbala.

Sweidan was among as many as 100 men kidnapped by gunmen in Iraqi police uniforms in an attack on a Higher Education Ministry building a year ago, one of Baghdad's worst mass kidnappings.

For months, Sweidan's family heard nothing, just like thousands of other families in a country where sectarian violence is an everyday reality.

"Since that time until last Thursday, we went many, many times to the Interior Ministry, to the Iraqi Red Crescent and to the morgue asking about him or about any information that would help us reach him," Sweidan's brother Adnan told Reuters.

Thousands of Iraqi families never get closure after relatives are sucked into the violence and never seen again.

"All of these governmental departments, they gave us nothing, no information that could help our search," Adnan said.

That changed unexpectedly last Thursday when relatives who had gone to Baghdad's morgue looking for the body of another family member. They saw a photograph of Salam, a political science PhD who worked at the ministry, taken after his death.

The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that 10,000 unidentified bodies were brought to Baghdad's main morgue in the year to August 2007.

MORE SHOCKS

As Sunni Arabs, the family feared going to the morgue itself, located in a part of the city with a heavy presence of Shi'ite militias.

They soon found that the body of Salam, in his early 60s, had arrived on November 21 last year, one week after the kidnapping.

"We went there many times to ask about him," said Adnan, angry that morgue officials had told the family nothing.

Salam's file at the morgue indicated his body had been taken for burial in Kerbala.

Unidentified bodies in Iraq are generally kept in morgues for a week and are then buried in graves reserved for "unknowns" at cemeteries in Kerbala and another holy Shi'ite city, Najaf, if they are not identified or claimed by family members.