Dozens of Iraqis participated in the funeral of Shaima Alawadi, an Iraqi woman who was beaten to death in California in what police have said may be a hate crime, in Najaf on Saturday.

Alawadi was found severely beaten in her home in El Cajon along with a note that reportedly told the family to go back to Iraq and called them "terrorists." She was taken off life support on March 24.

The deadly attack on Alawadi and the note found with her have drawn widespread condemnation.

People including local officials, members of parliament and tribal figures gathered at the airport on Saturday to receive Alawadi's body, according to an AFP journalist.

Prayers were said over her body in the shrine of Imam Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Mohammed and a revered figure in Shiite Islam, after which she was buried in the massive Wadi al-Salam cemetery that surrounds the shrine, where Shiites from around the world are laid to rest.

Her husband and two of her five children were present for the funeral.

"We do not know the reason for the crime. Shaima had no problems with anybody there," her father, Nabil Alawadi, told AFP.

"We call on the (Iraqi) government to intervene to pursue this case, and we call on the American government to reveal the circumstances of the incident and the motives and the identity of those" who committed the crime, he said.

Jim Redman, police chief of El Cajon, 15 miles east of San Diego, has said that "based on the contents of this note, we are not ruling out the possibility this may be a hate crime," describing it as "threatening," though he declined to reveal its specific contents.

But he added: "We are still in the very early stages of this investigation and have not drawn any conclusions at this point."

The family reportedly came to the United States from Iraq in the mid-1990s, when Iraq was hit by sanctions that strangled the country's economy and led to severe privation here following Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.