To the American forensics team now digging for evidence of war crimes in a mass grave of 300 Iraqi Kurds, human remains might hold the key to long-awaited justice for Saddam Hussein and his fellow Baath Party leaders.

But to Muslims inside Iraq and beyond, a quest for justice may not warrant disruption of a gravesite, no matter how murderous the killing on that site may have been. That's because the needs of the new Iraqi court must be shown to trump another cultural priority - keeping a final resting place intact and undisturbed.

That's a high bar to clear.

"To open a grave is forbidden," says Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, acting chairman of the Islamic Law Council of North America. "If it is required for the public interest, then it can be allowed, but this requires a special decision [from local religious authorities].

"My general feeling is that most of the Muslims would not go for that, to expose the bones and all of that. They would want to do an investigation in other ways."

With Iraqi grave exhumations having begun Sept. 1 with minimal fanfare to ensure safety during the investigations, American researchers are treading on terrain that would be emotionally explosive for any nation still reeling from atrocities committed on its soil. From Poland to Bosnia to Congo, survivors of varied religious backgrounds have at times made a common plea: Our loved ones suffered enough in life. Let them at least have peace in death.

To be sure, the past two decades have seen many instances of cooperation between local families and foreign investigators who took up their grisly task with a United Nations mandate to learn the truth. Initial objections have at times morphed into support, as happened in Indonesia in the 1990s, according to William Haglund, director of the International Forensics Program at Physicians for Human Rights.

"All we needed there was for the imam to come and say a prayer at the site before we began," says Dr. Haglund, who has been leading mass grave exhumations since 1993 but refused to take part in Iraq. "Usually in any country, the needs of justice supersede religious objections."

Even so, local peoples have been known to defend their burial customs vigorously when outsiders have cracked open graves without first consulting local religious authorities. In Jedwabne, Poland, for instance, a rabbi derailed Haglund's investigation-in-progress of a site where Nazis had reportedly burned 1,600 Jews. The reason: The project hadn't met criteria codified in Jewish tradition for disrupting a burial ground.

In Iraq, where investigators believe at least 300,000 bodies lie in mass graves, similar Muslim codes apply. Dr. Siddiqi says gravesite investigators would be expected to obtain prior approval from the local mufti, or religious figure with jurisdiction, and would do well to let an all-Muslim team gather the evidence. But security concerns in Iraq have instead led the American team and its Iraqi trainees to bypass local religious authorities, to brief only Iraqi government officials on their plans, and to begin discreetly in the remotest of locations, according to Gregory Kehoe, regime crimes liaison for the US government. "When you have your people in the field, you want to keep them as safe as possible," said Mr. Kehoe in a telephone interview from Iraq. "The fewer people who know you're out there digging, the better."

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