Sixteen dead bodies have been found in a ditch in a town north of Baghdad in Iraq.
Police said the bodies found near Muqdadiya in Diyala province were all adult men.
Police said they appeared to have been killed recently - 12 of them had been beheaded and the other four shot in the head.
Diyala Province, an ethnically and religiously-mixed region north of Baghdad, has been the scene of the worst violence in Iraq in recent months.
Violence in Iraq has reduced dramatically over the past several months, with the number of attacks countrywide falling by 60% since June, when an additional 30,000 US troops were fully deployed.
