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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraq's Interior Ministry is launching an investigation into reports of a death squad operating within the ministry, an official said Friday.

The ministry will look into the detention last month by U.S. soldiers of 22 Iraqi men who were dressed like police and were about to kill a Sunni Arab, said ministry official Hussein Kamal.

A U.S. military official in Baghdad on Thursday confirmed a Chicago Tribune report of American officials finding evidence of an alleged death squad within the Interior Ministry.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch said the 22 men detained at an Iraqi army checkpoint last month in the capital were Iraqi highway patrol officers. Of them, four were "planning to conduct a kidnapping and murder" of a Sunni man, he said. (Full story)

The Chicago paper said the soldiers stopped the men and asked them what they were doing.

The report comes as Iraqi officials try to cobble together national security forces.

Sunni Arabs, who held power until Saddam Hussein's ouster, have accused the Interior Ministry of using Shiite militias to target them for retribution. Iraq's insurgency is believed to be a predominately Sunni Arab movement.

Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr is a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite group backed by the Badr Organization, a political militia group.

Bodies found; police wounded

Iraqi police discovered four bodies Friday in the northwestern Baghdad neighborhood of Shula, Iraqi emergency police said.

All the bodies showed signs of torture, and the victims were shot in the back of the head, authorities said. None of the bodies had any identification on them, police said.

A few hours later, a roadside bomb wounded four Iraqi police in northern Baghdad.

The attack came a day after a roadside bomb wounded two Iraqi police in a Sunni area of the capital.

Also Thursday, gunmen kidnapped a bank director and his son in central Baghdad, killing five of their bodyguards.

Other developments

A German airplane en route from the Azerbaijan city of Baku to the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk has been missing since Thursday, the German Foreign Ministry said. A spokeswoman could not confirm the status of the aircraft, but the director of the airport in Sulaimaniya, Iraq, told Reuters on Friday a civilian plane had crashed in northern Iraq with four Germans and an Iraqi onboard.

The World Health Organization confirmed Iraq's second human case of infection from the H5N1 bird flu virus. The organization identified the man as the uncle of a girl who was the first Iraqi case -- a 15-year-old who died in January. The man, 39, who had cared for his niece, died 10 days later from the fatal strain of bird flu.

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