Group says militants killed 600 Iraqi prisoners
BAGHDAD - Militants from the Islamic State carried out a mass killing of hundreds of Iraqi prison inmates when they seized the country's second-largest city of Mosul in June, an international rights group said on Thursday.
Some 600 male Shiite inmates from Badoosh prison outside Mosul were forced to kneel along the edge of a nearby ravine and shot with automatic weapons, Human Rights Watch said in a statement based on interviews with 15 Shiite prisoners who survived the massacre.
The New York-based watchdog added that the Shiite prisoners were separated from several hundred Sunnis and a small number of Christians who were later set free. A number of Kurdish and Yazidi inmates were also killed, while between 50 and 100 men from accused on claiming to be Sunnis taken to unknown place, they said.
The prisoners had been serving sentences for a range of crimes, from murder and assault to nonviolent offenses.
