BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraqi authorities found 41 decomposed bodies – some bullet-riddled, others beheaded – at sites near the Syrian border and south of the capital, and said Wednesday they included women and children who may have been killed because insurgents thought their families were collaborating with American forces.

In Baghdad, a suicide bomber driving a garbage truck loaded with explosives and at least one other gunman shot their way into a parking lot in an attempt to blow up a hotel used by Western contractors. At least four people, including the attackers and a guard, were killed.

The American Embassy said 30 Americans were among 40 people wounded in the blast. No Americans were killed. In an Internet statement, Al Qaeda in Iraq purportedly claimed responsibility for the attack on the Sadeer hotel, calling it the “hotel of the Jews.”

While Sunni Arab insurgents have repeatedly targeted Westerners in Iraq, Shiite Muslims, top Iraqi officials, and civil servants, even Muslim women are no longer safe.

Decapitated bodies of women have begun turning up in recent weeks, a note with the word “collaborator” usually pinned to their chests. Three women alleged to be collaborators were gunned down Tuesday in one of Baghdad’s Shiite neighborhoods. And in the northern city of Kirkuk, a woman identified as Nawal Mohammed, who worked with American forces, was killed in a drive-by shooting, police said.

The decomposed bodies were found Tuesday after reports of their stench reached authorities.

Twenty-six of the dead were discovered in a field near Rumana, a village 12 miles east of the western city of Qaim, near the Syrian border. Each body was riddled with bullets. The dead were found wearing civilian clothes and one was a woman, police Captain Muzahim al-Karbouli said.

The other site was south of Baghdad in Latifiya, where Iraqi troops found 15 headless bodies in a building at an abandoned army base, Defense Ministry Captain Sabah Yassin said.

The bodies included 10 men, three women, and two children. Their identities, like the others found in western Iraq, were not known, but insurgents may have viewed them or their relatives as collaborators.

Captain Yassin said some of men found dead in Latifiya were thought to have been part of a group of Iraqi soldiers who were kidnapped by insurgents two weeks ago.

The gruesome discoveries were among 58 new killings in Iraq announced yesterday, including the death of an American soldier in a Baghdad roadside bombing.

Mahdi al-Hafidh, Iraq’s interim planning minister, a Shiite, narrowly escaped death yesterday after gunmen opened fire on his convoy in the capital. Two of his bodyguards were killed and two others were wounded.

“I’m fine, just sorry about the death of the guards, who were still young,” he told state-run Al-Iraqiya TV. “It is a part of the crisis that Iraq is living, but we will keep going for the sake of Iraq, to get rid of terrorism, and build a democratic country.”

Qataa Abdul Nabi, the director general of the Shiite Endowment, was shot to death Tuesday as he drove home – the second high-ranking member of the Shiite charity to be killed in a week.