UN Team Studies Iraq Elections

Prince Charles Visits Troops; GI Killed

(AP)  A U.N. team met with Iraqi leaders Sunday to discuss the chances of holding early legislative elections, and its leader pledged to do “everything possible” to help the country regain its sovereignty.

Meanwhile, insurgents attacked U.S. Army convoys in three areas, killing one soldier and wounding three others Sunday, witnesses and the U.S. command said. A bomb planted inside a police station killed three policemen and injured 11 others on Saturday, officials said.

In southeastern Iraq, about 90 Japanese soldiers began their controversial humanitarian mission. They are the first Japanese troops in a combat zone since World War II.

Also, Prince Charles made a surprise visit to British troops in the southern city of Basra on Sunday amid tight security, the first member of the royal family to visit the country since the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

Charles — wearing desert camouflage combats, sturdy boots and a black beret — met more than 200 soldiers from the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment and thanked them for their work in Iraq.

In another development, the United States believes it has found at least $300 million Saddam Hussein hid in banks, yet doesn't have enough evidence to get countries such as Syria and Switzerland to hand over the money, U.S. and European officials told The Associated Press.

Much to the frustration of the Bush administration, countries that acted quickly on relatively weak evidence involving al-Qaida funds have been unwilling to do the same on Iraq, partly because of growing doubts about the quality of U.S. intelligence.

Elsewhere, Iraqi workers unearthed a mass grave containing the remains of at least 50 people.

U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and his team held talks for about two hours with members of the U.S.-installed Governing Council on the second day of a mission to break the impasse between the United States and the country's influential Shiite Muslim clergy on the blueprint for transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis.

“The U.N. can only emphasize its wish to do everything possible to help the Iraqi people with all their sects and components to come out from their long plight and to help them regain independence and sovereignty,” said Brahimi, who is Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special adviser on Iraq.

A senior Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the team would stay here about 10 days.

“We are here to see what kind of mechanism the Iraqis feel is more appropriate to their country,” the team's spokesman, Ahmed Fawzi, said.

The United Nations withdrew its international staff from Iraq last year following two attacks against their headquarters. The Aug. 19 truck bombing killed 22 people, including the top envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

The team members were expected to travel to the Shiite holy city of Najaf to meet Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, whose demand for early elections threatens to torpedo U.S. plans for transferring power to Iraqis by July 1.

Al-Sistani opposes the American plan to appoint the legislature through 18 regional caucuses. The legislature will choose a new sovereign government to take office by July 1.

Also Sunday, Ahmad Chalabi, a Westernized Shiite politician with close Pentagon links, met with al-Sistani for about 90 minutes in Najaf, and said the U.N. team could be persuaded that early elections were possible.

Although the Shiites are pressing for an early ballot, many leading Sunni Muslims fear an election under U.S. occupation would produce a government dominated by majority Shiites, who were suppressed for generations by Iraq's Sunni Arab minority.

The Governing Council president, Mohsen Abdel-Hamid, said Sunday's talks with the U.N. team covered “all forms of an election that are adequate to bring about a representative government.”

The United States and its Governing Council allies say elections cannot be held under the current unstable security conditions. They also cite the lack of proper census or electoral rolls.

In the latest violence, a U.S. soldier was killed Sunday by a roadside bomb near Mahmudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, a military spokesman said. No other details were available.

Another roadside bomb in Fallujah west of Baghdad injured two soldiers, witnesses said. In the northern city of Mosul, a U.S. convoy was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade Sunday, and one soldier was wounded, witnesses said.

On Saturday, a bomb exploded inside a police station, killing three policemen and wounding 11 others, in Suwayrah town, 30 miles south of Baghdad, police Lt. Odai Salman Abed said Sunday.

A heavily armored convoy of Japanese troops arrived from Kuwait on Sunday in Samawah, marking Japan's first military deployment to a combat zone since 1945.

The ground troops, most of them engineers, were leading a deployment that will eventually reach about 800 soldiers in a humanitarian mission to improve water supplies and other infrastructure projects around Samawah in southeastern Iraq.

On Sunday, workers alerted by farmers to human bones sticking out of the ground in Kifai, near the southern Shiite town of Najaf, unearthed a mass grave holding the skulls and smashed bones of about 50 people.

Haitham al-Issawi, a local Shiite cleric supervising the digging, said the grave apparently dated back to the 1991 Shiite uprising that was crushed by Saddam Hussein's forces.

Since the fall of Saddam's regime, several mass graves of Shiites have been discovered in southern Iraq. Although a majority, Shiites were brutally suppressed by Saddam's Sunni-dominated government.

“We ask those who defend Saddam, where did these bodies come from,” al-Issawi said.