In other developments Tuesday, 14 men killed with a single bullet to the head were found in a cemetery in Mosul, and rebels attacked a Iraqi police convoy travelling from Basra to Baghdad, killing at least four police officers.

Hours earlier, the second suicide car bomber in 24 hours struck one of the entrances to the government compound where Allawi was speaking, wounding 12 people and possibly killing several

Allawi told Iraq's National Council in Baghdad that the grave was found near the city of Sulaimaniya in the autonomous Kurdish region in the northeast of the country, where Saddam Hussein's forces carried out atrocities in the late 1980s.

He gave no further details, but residents living nearby said workers found the remains while preparing the ground for a new hospital near a highway in Debashan, north of Sulaimaniya.

Iraq's Ministry of Human Rights has sealed off the site.