New York ? Gruesome front page photos showing the charred remains of U.S. citizens killed in an ambush in Iraq prompted complaints from some readers that the images were too graphic.

The New York Times, Miami Herald and USA Today said they received a moderate number of complaints from irate or offended readers about the prominent use of the photos.

The New York Times ran a large photo on its front page showing the bodies of American civilians hanging from a bridge, while USA Today, the largest-circulation daily in the country, ran a somewhat less graphic photo on its front page showing Iraqis beating the remains of American workers with shoes.

USA Today spokeswoman Heidi Henderson said the paper received 20 e-mails and a dozen phone calls that were largely critical of the decision to use the photo. She said the newspaper planned to print some of the responses in the letters-to-the-editor section of Friday’s paper.

The Miami Herald front page editor Liza Gross said executive editor Tom Fiedler planned to write a column for Sunday’s paper explaining the process that editors go through in making such decisions.

“We have been saying that these decisions were not made lightly, and that we discarded many more gruesome (photos). But our responsibility is to present the facts as they are,” Gross said.

The Boston Herald also used a photo of the bridge scene on its front page Thursday, along with an editors’ note saying: “The body of the U.S. citizen in the photo has been intentionally darkened using Photoshop to obscure the graphic content.”

Managing editor Andrew Gully said the newspaper received about 35 complaints from readers about the photos, but that amount was “light” and less than the paper had been expecting.

As for obscuring the photo, Gully said: “It’s a matter of degree. You want to give as much as you can without going over the line.”

Fox News Channel limited its images to shots of the burning vehicles in which the contractors had been riding, and CBS used some of the graphic footage but blurred images of the bodies.

Other newspapers shied away from using the most graphic images on their front pages. The Orlando Sentinel used the image of the bodies hanging from the bridge inside the paper, and a less graphic one on the front page of Iraqis dancing on a destroyed vehicle.

Manning Pynn, the newspaper’s public editor, said the reader response had been “very light.”