World

Son Of Iraq's Top Judge Murdered

May 14, 2006 / 7:46 AM EDT / CBS/AP

Gunmen killed the son of Iraq's top judge along with two of his bodyguards and dumped their bodies in Baghdad, officials said Saturday. Other attacks outside the capital killed five Iraqis and a U.S. soldier, police said.

On Saturday, police found the bodies of Ahmed Midhat al-Mahmoud, 22, a lawyer, and two of his bodyguards in northern Baghdad's Azamiyah district, said Hasan Sabri the head of the local council and Iraq's deputy justice minister, Busho Ibrahim Ali.

The killings came five months after the judge, Midhat al-Mahmoud, survived a Dec. 4 suicide bomb attack against his home. Two people were injured in the attack.

Ahmed Midhat Al-Mahmoud's father heads the Supreme Judicial Council, a judicial supervisory body which among other things swears in all judges and parliament.

The al-Mahmoud family is Shiite and the three bodies were found dumped onto a street in the mostly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Azamiyah, Sabri and Ali said.

In other developments:

Five Iraqis were killed in drive-by shootings on Saturday, including a tribal sheik, while a U.S. Army soldier died in a roadside bomb attack, officials said.

A U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb south of Baghdad, the military said. At least 2,437 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan reports that in downtown Ramadi, the fight with the Iraqi insurgency is up close – and, as for one company of U.S. Marines, it's very personal.

A former weapons inspector claims that American officials suppressed information about Iraqi "bioweapons trailers" for more than a year after intelligence personnel discovered the trailers were not used for biological weapons.

Four U.S. Marines died when their tank rolled off a bridge into a canal, the military said Friday.

"This, according to the military, was not the result of enemy action. It's simply an accident," reports CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey.

"Bridges over irrigation canals are not the Golden Gate Bridge," Pizzey says. "These are narrow little bridges, sometimes only one lane, sometimes almost makeshift, like the military used to use in World War II."

The violence came as Prime Minister-designate Nouri al-Maliki struggled to put together his Cabinet, the final step in establishing his new government of national unity. The pace has been slow because of competing rivalries among Iraq's political parties, most of which represent specific religious or ethnic groups.

Frustration with the process led one Shiite party, Fadhila, to announce Friday that it was withdrawing from the Cabinet negotiations, saying the process was being driven by partisan self-interest and U.S. pressure.

The party said its 15 legislators will now form an opposition bloc in parliament.

Al-Maliki is working against a constitutional deadline of May 22 to present his Cabinet to 275-member parliament for its approval. Squabbles over top posts such as the oil, defense and interior ministries threaten to push the talks down to the wire.

Some lawmakers have suggested that al-Maliki could present some of his Cabinet on Sunday and take for himself the defense ministry which controls Iraq's military - and the interior portfolio, which oversees Iraqi police - until all parties agree on who should head them.

Kurdistan's parliament recently formally unified the Kurdish region's two long-standing regional governments, one headed by the PUK and the other by the Kurdistan Democratic Party. The step was expected to consolidate and strengthen the Kurds' push for power in the north, where they have enjoyed self-rule in three provinces.