It's only a small grave, a rectangle of cheap concrete marking it out, blessed by a flourish of wild yellow lilies. Inside are the powdered bones and skulls and bits of femur of up to 300 children, Armenian orphans of the great 1915 genocide who died of cholera and starvation as the Turkish authorities tried to "Turkify" them in a converted Catholic college high above Beirut. But for once, it is the almost unknown story of the surviving 1,200 children – between three and 15 years old – who lived in the crowded dormitory of this ironically beautiful cut-stone school that proves that the Turks did indeed commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915.

A car bomb killed four Iranian pilgrims near Iraq's holiest Shia Muslim shrine yesterday, on the eve the parliamentary elections. Sunni Islamist militants have vowed to wreck the vote. The blast destroyed two buses parked near the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, which draws millions of pilgrims from Iraq and Iran each year.

A car bomb exploded in Iraq's holy city of Najaf on today, killing four Iranian pilgrims a day before a parliamentary election that Islamist insurgents have vowed to wreck with violence, officials said.