Many Iraqis say the giveaway that the abductors are at least connected to the police is the preponderance of reports involving Land Cruisers, Glocks and other expensive equipment.

On May 5, for example, 14 Sunni farmers were picked up from an east Baghdad vegetable market. The farmers had driven to the capital from Madain, a town south of Baghdad where the month before Sunni insurgents allegedly had kidnapped and executed a number of Shiites.

The bodies of the farmers were discovered in shallow graves the next day. They'd been blindfolded and tortured, and their hands had been cuffed behind their backs.

In separate interviews this week, two men who were at the east Baghdad market at the time said they saw a large group of police detain the farmers.

"A patrol of more than 10 police vehicles drove up and parked," said Ali Karim, a fruit vendor. "They were running through the street with their guns, saying that the farmers had a car bomb with them. They pushed them against the walls and asked them for their IDs."

Another vendor, Ahmed Adil, gave a similar account in a separate interview.

"We were sitting, and the police cars pulled up and spread in different directions," Adil said. "A neighborhood guard asked the police what they were doing - he said these are just farmers - and the police said don't get involved, they have a car bomb with them."

A brigadier general in the Interior Ministry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said his brother was taken during a large raid on May 14 in his working-class Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad.

His brother's body was found a day later. It bore signs of torture.

The general, who wasn't there when his brother was detained, said he canvassed the neighborhood and interviewed one family after the next.

The descriptions of the abductors were identical in every case, he said: They came in white police Toyota Land Cruisers, wore police commando uniforms, flak vests and helmets. They also had Glocks.

The general said he's tried, through the Interior Ministry, to find out which commando unit was in that neighborhood when his brother disappeared. He also said colleagues have told him that his own life is now in danger.

A day before the general's brother disappeared in west Baghdad, Anwar Jassim, a Sunni welder at Iraq's ministry of industry and minerals, went missing from his south Baghdad home.

Jassim's family said he was taken by a large group of men dressed and equipped like police commandos.

Another man taken in Jassim's neighborhood, a local grocer who gave his name as Abu Ahmed, said he was taken to the same detention facility as Jassim. While he was there, he said, he and other men sat on the floor blindfolded and handcuffed. They listened to other prisoners screaming.

When the other prisoners were brought back into the room, Abu Ahmed said, they said they'd been pummeled with long wooden staffs.

"When we were in detention, they put blindfolds and handcuffs on us. On the second day, the soldiers were saying, `He's dead,' " said Abu Ahmed. "Later, we found out it was Anwar."

The abductors dropped Jassim's body at Baghdad's Yarmuk hospital the next day, hospital staffers said. According to hospital records, Jassim had a bullet wound in the back of his head and cuts and bruises on his abdomen, back and neck.

The man in charge of the Yarmuk morgue, who gave his name as Abu Amir, said he remembers the day the commandos brought Jassim's corpse.

"The commandos told me to keep the body outside of the refrigerator so that the dogs could eat it because he's a terrorist and he deserves it," Abu Amir said.

The killings didn't stop in May.

Saadi Khalif's body was also found at Yarmuk. The 52-year-old Sunni, along with his brother Mohammed, was taken from his home in western Baghdad on June 10. His abductors rode up in pickup trucks painted with Iraqi police insignia, his family said. About 10 came into the house, while about twice as many fanned out in the street outside, forming a security perimeter. They had radios, uniforms, flak vests and helmets, family members said.

"The doctor told us he was choked and tortured before they shot him," said Ahmed Khalif, one of Saadi's brothers. "He looked like he had been dragged by a car."

Mohammed Khalif, 47, also beaten and shot, still had on metal handcuffs at the Yarmuk morgue.