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Journalists attend the morgue holding the bodies from the bus
The bodies of 18 men who had been shot or strangled have been found in a minibus in western Baghdad, police and officials say.
A security patrol reportedly found the abandoned bus on the road between the Amiriyah and Khadra districts.
The men were found bound and blindfolded, officials said.
Iraq has suffered a rise in sectarian attacks since the bombing of a key Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February but it is not known if this was the cause.
However, the dumping of bodies apparently executed has previously been a sign of the violence between minority Sunni Arab and majority Shia groups.
Amiriyah is a troubled suburb in west Baghdad mainly populated by Sunni Arabs.
Civil war fears
Police said the bodies had no identification papers on them. But some reports said two of the men looked like foreign Arabs.
Sources at Yarmouk Hospital told the Associated Press news agency the deaths appeared recent and that two of the victims had been shot while the others were strangled.
The men were dressed in civilian clothes and ranged from young to middle-aged.
In other violence on Wednesday:
* Two policemen are killed and five people hurt in a roadside bombing in central Baghdad
* Another roadside bomb targets a convoy of Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr in central Baghdad, killing two people, police and ministry sources say. The minister is not present
* At least two people are killed in a car bomb attack in the western town of Falluja, police say.
The bombing of the shrine at Samarra and subsequent reprisals, in which more than 400 people have died, have sparked fears of civil war.
US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad said on Tuesday the country remained vulnerable to insurgents' attempts to exploit the political uncertainty caused by the bombing.
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"There is a concerted effort to provoke civil war," he said.
Mr Khalilzad told the Los Angeles Times the US-led invasion in 2003 had opened "the Pandora's box" of tensions in Iraq.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not believe a civil war was going on in Iraq, although admitted that such danger remained.
Iraq's parliament is set to sit on Sunday for the first time since the December elections.
But wrangling between Shia, Sunni Arab and Kurdish parties, particularly over the choice by the Shia-led bloc of Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister, has cast doubt on the formation of any government of national unity.
