World

21 Killed In Two Days In Iraq

March 28, 2004 / 11:34 AM EST / CBS/AP

Rebels fired a rocket at a government building in northern Iraq on Saturday, killing two civilians and wounding 14 others, official said. The attack brought to 21 the number of people confirmed killed in two days of explosions and shootings across the country.

The rocket launcher was hidden inside a wooden cart that was wheeled up to a bomb-blast wall surrounding the three-story main government building in the northern city of Mosul, police Sgt. Jassim Mohammed said.

The rocket struck the top of the wall before falling into the building's courtyard and exploding, he said. The assailants fled the area after the attack.

In the country's south Saturday, a gunman shot and killed the Iraqi driver of a civilian truck carrying supplies to Japan's military, Japan's Kyodo News agency said. The attack was an apparent robbery attempt, it said.

Japan's Defense Agency said a civilian truck hired to transport supplies to Japanese troops in Samawah was attacked, but had no other details.

Tokyo has dispatched about 1,000 naval, air, and ground forces to the region to help with Iraq's reconstruction. Some 500 of the 1,000 are in Iraq. The last 120 of the 500 crossed into Iraq from Kuwait on Saturday, completing Japan's largest and most contested military deployment since World War II.

In central Baghdad Saturday, a bomb exploded on a street as a convoy of sport utility vehicles passed, wounding five Iraqis, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Peter Jones said. It was not clear who was in the cars. U.S. troops sealed off the area after the blast.

In other developments:

The British Broadcasting Corp. reported Friday night that U.S. forces tracked down Saddam Hussein in Iraq last year with information provided by a captured bodyguard. The United States had posted a $25 million reward for help in capturing Saddam. But officials said that money was not likely to be given out because he was located by the U.S. military.

A French lawyer infamous for defending Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal and Nazi Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie said Saturday he has been asked to defend Saddam Hussein. Jacques Verges told France-Inter radio he had received a letter from Saddam's family confirming his role as Saddam's attorney.

CBS News Reporter Lisa Barron says U.S. troops are again being accused of mistakenly killing an Iraqi civilian -- this time in the northern oil city of Kirkuk. A senior police official says the soldiers killed the Iraqi, who worked with the U.S. organization RTI International, and wounded two others after opening fire on their car by mistake. The U.S. military says it has no information on the reported incident.

Barron says Ayatollah Ali al Sistani is presenting another major challenge to Washington's plan to transfer power to Iraqis on June 30. An aide to the influential cleric said at Friday prayers in Kuwait that if Article 61 of the interim constitution isn't amended, al Sistani may issue a religious edict declaring the handover illegal. The article relates to the drafting of a permanent constitution. But the aide didn't specify what changes al Sistani wants.

A U.N. electoral team, which will look at technical aspects of selecting Iraq's interim government in the lead-up to the June 30 transfer of sovereignty, arrived in Baghdad on Friday.

In the northern city of Irbil, a Kurdish member of the Governing Council, Jalal Talabani, told a conference that building a new country requires reconciliation among divided ethnic, religious and political groups. "National reconciliation is a prerequisite for building the new Iraq," Talabani said. "Slogans such as, 'We are all Iraqis' and, 'We're all brothers' aren't enough."

The U.S.-led coalition in Iraq has formed a media-regulating body charged with organizing telecommunications and broadcast operators and devising codes of conduct, a senior coalition official told The Associated Press on Saturday.

Fighting Friday in the city of Fallujah, about 35 miles west of Baghdad, left one U.S. Marine dead and seven wounded, a U.S. spokesman in Baghdad said. The Marines and guerrillas fought for hours in the alleys of the city, which has resisted American efforts to pacify it since the ouster of Saddam Hussein a year ago.

A freelance cameraman for ABC News, Burhan Mohammed Mazhour, 34, was shot in the head and killed while filming the clashes. It was unclear who killed him.

"We are trying to confirm all the details surrounding his death and have asked the U.S. military for an investigation," ABC News President David Westin said in a statement from New York.

Four other Iraqis were killed and six wounded in the fighting, said a doctor at Fallujah hospital, Diyaa al-Jumailee. Witnesses said the dead included a shop owner, a customer and two bystanders.

This week, U.S. Marines took over authority in Fallujah and surrounding areas from the U.S. Army. The city on the banks of the Euphrates River is in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where support for Saddam was strong and rebel attacks on American forces are frequent.

In recent months, American troops have rarely ventured into downtown Fallujah, one of the most dangerous areas in Iraq for the U.S. military.

Earlier Friday, four members of the U.S.-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, or ICDC, also were killed while raiding a hideout near Saddam's hometown of Tikrit with U.S. soldiers, the American military said. Three suspected rebels also died and 21 were captured in the raid.

In the town of Shwan, near the northern city of Kirkuk, four people en route to a wedding died when the vehicles they were riding in struck an anti-tank mine. The explosion injured 12 other people, police said.

Gunmen shot and killed an Iraqi police officer late Friday while he was walking home in Kirkuk, Fhadila Rashid, an official at the city's morgue, said Saturday.

Also Friday, Time magazine said Omar Hashim Kamal, an Iraqi translator who worked in its Baghdad bureau, died of wounds sustained Wednesday. Kamal was shot by unidentified assailants.