World

Suspects Detained As Iraq Mourns

March 3, 2004 / 1:50 PM EST / CBS/AP

Authorities say Iraqi police and U.S. troops detained 15 people, including four thought to be Iranian, in the devastating suicide attacks against Shiite Muslim pilgrims in Baghdad and Karbala.

Police are trying to sort out the number of dead in Tuesday's near-simultaneous blasts at Shiite holy shrines and how militants staged Iraq's bloodiest attacks since the war ended.

U.S. officials lowered their death toll Wednesday to 117 from 143, released late Tuesday. But the president of Iraq's Governing Council said the casualty toll was 271 dead and 393 injured.

It was impossible to immediately reconcile the discrepancy.

The confusion reflected the chaos Tuesday, when suicide attackers set off bombs and explosives, apparently on wooden pushcarts, among thousands of pilgrims who were gathered in the two cities for the holiest day of the Shiite calendar, the mourning ceremony of Ashoura.

U.S. officials and Iraqi leaders have named an al Qaeda-linked Jordanian militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as a "prime suspect" for the attacks, saying he is seeking to spark a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq to wreck U.S. plans to hand over power to the Iraqis on June 30.

Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council pleaded with Iraqis to remain united - an attempt to avert reprisals.

In other developments:

A draft constitution drawn up earlier this week by Iraq's leading politicians and the U.S.-led administration will be signed Friday, the current president of the Iraqi Governing Council said.

Explosions were heard in Baghdad early Wednesday when three missiles hit a telephone exchange building. Police said the missiles wounded one Iraqi and damaged the building in the capital's Mansour neighborhood.

Iraq apparently destroyed most of its known chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles years before the United States invaded last March, a report from United Nations inspectors claims.

The attacks forced the delay of a milestone in the path toward the U.S. handover of power to the Iraqis on June 30 - the planned Thursday signing of an interim constitution agreed to by council members this week. Iraq's top U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said the signing would be delayed as the Governing Council declared a three-day mourning period.

Japan's Foreign Ministry urged Japanese nationals visiting or living in Iraq to leave, a day after suicide attackers set off bombs in two Iraqi cities that killed at least 117 and wounded hundreds of others.

The Navy's top admiral says investigations in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad have found no evidence a missing Navy pilot was ever in Iraqi hands. Michael Speicher was shot down on the first night of the 1991 Gulf War. Stories have surfaced he was held in captivity after he crashed.

Tuesday's attacks fanned the Shiites fears and anger at a time when leaders of Iraq's Shiite majority are pressing for more power in a future government after years of oppression under Saddam Hussein's regime.

Some outraged Shiites lashed out Tuesday at U.S. forces. Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Hussein al-Sistani - who holds enormous influence among Shiites - blamed the Americans for not providing security.

The bombings, says White House spokesman Scott McClellan, are "brutal terrorist attacks," the work of "enemies of freedom." "They will fail," he said. "Democracy is taking root and it cannot be turned back."

The coalition official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said 15 people were detained in Karbala after the blasts, nine of them in Iraqi custody. The others, being held by coalition forces, included four Farsi speakers thought to be Iranians, the official said.

An estimated 100,000 Iranians were believed to have come to Iraq for Ashoura, and many Iranians are present around the holy shrines throughout the year.

Ashoura commemorates the 7th century martyrdom of the prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussein, the event that triggered the schism between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

Just two hours after Tuesday's attacks on Shiite pilgrims in Iraq, attackers in Quetta, Pakistan, sprayed gunfire and lobbed grenades into a solemn religious procession of Shiite Muslims, then blew themselves up as survivors scattered. At least 42 people died, and more than 160 were wounded.

In Iraq, it appeared other attacks had been planned. Iraqi officials said suicide bombers were arrested in the southern city of Basra and in police in oil-rich Kirkuk found a bomb with 22 pounds of TNT alongside a road where Shiites had planned to march.

Anwar Amin, the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps chief in Kirkuk, said Wednesday that police defused the bomb and the march was canceled at the request of police.

U.S. and Iraqi officials, meanwhile, tried to get a clearer picture of how the well-organized attacks were carried out at Baghdad's Kazimiya shrine - the biggest Shiite holy site in the capital - and at the Imam Hussein shrine in Karbala, 50 miles to the south.

Two or three suicide bombers detonated the explosives strapped to their bodies at Kazimiya, the coalition official said. Earlier reports that a fourth bomber at Kazimiya was captured after his explosives failed to go off turned out to be incorrect, the official said.

In Karbala, there was apparently one suicide bomber and several sets of explosives brought to the site on wooden carts, frequently used to bring supplies to pilgrims or ferry the elderly between holy sites, the official said. Most of the casualties were caused by the cart-borne bombs, he said.

FBI agents and other experts are prepared to visit the sites in Baghdad and Karbala to investigate, but so far Iraqi authorities have not invited them, the official said.