BAGHDAD (Reuters):

Iraqi police found 60 bodies dumped across Baghdad in the 24 hours until yesterday morning, the apparent victims of sectarian death squads blamed for escalating violence that threatens to pitch the country into civil war.

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A bomb placed under a car outside a bakery in the mostly Sunni southern Baghdad district of Doura exploded at midday, reducing the shop to rubble and killing 10 people, many who had been queuing outside to buy bread, police said.

Iraq has been gripped by Sunni-Shi'ite bloodletting since the bombing of a revered Shi'ite shrine in February. The United Nations estimates 100 Iraqis die violently every day.

The violence continues largely unchecked despite United States efforts to build up Iraq's fledgling security forces, a major security crackdown in the capital and a series of peace plans by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's four-month-old government.

Most of the 60 bodies, victims of the deaths squads who roam Baghdad torturing and killing at will, had been shot in the head execution-style, an Interior Ministry official told Reuters.

In the most high-profile killing in recent weeks, gunmen in camouflage uniform on Monday shot dead the brother of Iraq's Sunni Vice-President, Tareq al-Hashemi. He was the third of Hashemi's siblings to be killed since April.