Islamic State shot 600 Iraqi prisoners in mass killing, says rights group

Islamic State militants executed 600 Iraqi prisoners, forcing them to kneel on the edge of a ravine before they were shot, an international rights group said.

They carried out the mass killings of Shiite inmates from Badoosh prison outside Mosul when they seized the country's second-largest city in June.

The New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch added that the Shiite prisoners were separated from several hundred Sunnis and a small number of Christians who were later set free. A number of Kurdish and Yazidi inmates were also killed, they said.

It made the statement based on interviews with 15 Shiite prisoners who survived the massacre.

The prisoners had been serving sentences for a range of crimes, from murder and assault to nonviolent offences.

Before separating them, the gunmen herded up to 1,500 inmates onto trucks and drove them to an isolated stretch of desert about 2km from the prison, the survivors said. After taking several hundred away in trucks, they forced the Shiites to form one long line along the ravine edge and then count their number in the line before showering them with machine-gun fire.