Rotting flesh still hanging to the bones, locks of hair and striped prison uniforms are set out on plastic sheets under the hot sun.

The stench is nauseating. The killing here was recent, unlike at most of the mass graves uncovered so far in Iraq.

The sandy field on the banks of Diyala river was owned by the defunct intelligence services and lies next to a military camp.

At least six bodies, three in prisoners uniforms, were taken out of the grave in the eastern province of Diyala to be buried elsewhere, residents told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

One body was dressed in pyjamas, another had been blindfolded, while a third had his hands tied and had been shot in the back of the head.

Residents said they covered the grave with earth and informed the U.S. occupation authorities who asked them to leave the site untouched for the purposes of the investigation.

Scores of prisoners were driven by truck to the site, which was used by intelligence services, on April 4 and were executed there, said the residents said.

The inhabitants, some of whom said they had witnessed the executions, estimated there were some 100 bodies in the grave.

The stench of remains came out of two holes from which bodies were dug out at the sandy site on the banks of Diyala river.

It's a slow, painstaking process carried out by volunteers surrounded by a crowd eager for the slightest evidence of a lost father, brother, cousin or friend.

Human rights groups believe that more than a quarter of a million people disappeared during the long rule of Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party, the BBC News Online reported.

Jassab Laibi, 54, rushed here to try to find the body of his son. Both men were locked up in the sinister Abu Ghraib prison on the western edge of Baghdad. Ali, a second lieutenant, was jailed in December 2002, accused of belonging to the banned "Free Officers" movement.

"I lost trace of him when the prison authorities took 173 prisoners from Abu Ghraib on April 4, five days before the regime fell, supposedly to Fallujah jail," says the father.

He himself was released from prison on April 11 when the gates were flung open.

Among other Free Officers taken away on April 4 were Colonel Nizar Othman.

"We have searched the mass graves found in Iraq so far, but in vain," sighed the brother of Colonel Nizar.

At the site, a mechanical digger is breaking through the ground. A pair of flip-flops like those worn by Iraqi prisoners and an old shoe lie in the sand.

Volunteers from the Al-Walaa human rights group run by the Shiite seminary Hawza, are clawing through the soil with their bare hands or with spades.

"An intelligence officer called Jamal was gunned down after asking for the execution of prisoners to be postponed at a moment when the regime was on the run," says one local resident, who refused to give his name.

Meanwhile, the remains of a Kuwaiti prisoner of war (POW) who was taken from the emirate during the 1990-1991 Iraqi occupation have been found in the mass grave in southern Iraq, a Kuwaiti minister said Sunday.

DNA testing revealed the remains belonged to Saad Meshal Aswad al-Enezi, said the emirate's deputy premier and minister of state for cabinet affairs, Mohammed Diefallah Sharar.

The remains were found in a grave near Samawa, 200 kilometers (120 miles) south of Baghdad, Sharar said, quoted by the official KUNA news agency.

Sharar said Enezi had been taken prisoner by the Iraqi army on November 1, 1990. "It has been established that he was shot dead between 1991 and 1992," the state minister said.

Fayez al-Anzi, spokesman for the team formed by the Kuwaiti government to follow up on the fate of the POWs, told KUNA that the mass grave in Samawa could contain the remains of other Kuwaitis.

Forensic teams from Kuwait are currently in Iraq to inspect mass graves and track down information on the 605 people that Kuwait claims disappeared 12 years ago during Iraq's seven-month long occupation.