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Roadside bomb hits Iraqi police patrol A roadside bomb hit an Iraqi police patrol Sunday in a southern city and gunmen opened fire on a coffeeshop in the north, leaving at least one dead and injuring four others countrywide as Iraq's tiny Christian community celebrated Easter.
Officials summoned Iraq's newly elected lawmakers for a Tuesday meeting where parliament is expected to name top leaders of the country's first freely elected government in half a decade.
Congregants gathered at the Virgin Mary Church in Baghdad to celebrate a day marking the resurrection of Christ.
"We are brothers with all Iraqis and will remain so forever," said one parishioner, Sabah Rasam, who is part of a Christian community that accounts for an estimated 3 percent of Iraq's 25 million people.
Violence persisted on Sunday, with assailants opening fire on a cafe popular with ethnic Kurds in the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, killing one and injuring three, said Brig. Sarhat Kadre of the police force in the city 180 miles north of Baghdad. The motive behind the attack was unclear.
Iraq's insurgency appears to be scaling back attacks on U.S. military forces while focusing its deadly efforts on government workers, primarily targeting Iraq's fledgling security forces.
A video posted Sunday on the Internet purportedly showed an Iraqi Interior Ministry official hostage being shot dead by militants from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terror network.
There was no way to independently authenticate the video, which was posted on a militant Web site.
The video showed a man identifying himself as Col. Ryadh Katie Olyway seated between two masked men. He displayed his Interior Ministry identification card and said he was a liaison officer with the American forces. Behind the men was the black banner of Al-Qaida in Iraq.
Olyway said he provided the U.S. military with the names "of officers of the former Iraqi army, who are Sunnis, and their addresses."
The hostage, referring to female Iraqi prisoners, said he had witnessed "different methods of torture and violation of their honor."
Al-Qaida in Iraq has said many of its latest killings were in revenge for female Iraqi prisoners. The American military has denied it is holding any Iraqi women.
Olyway was shown blindfolded, and a third masked man shot him once in the head.
Meanwhile, in the southern oil city of Basra, insurgents hit a police patrol with a roadside bomb, injuring a nearby civilian, said Lt. Col. Karim Ali Al-Zaydi.
A parliamentary statement issued Sunday said Iraq's newly elected National Assembly is to convene for its second meeting Tuesday inside the Green Zone, the riverside area in Baghdad heavily guarded by U.S. troops.
A Shiite bloc and Kurdish parties that are expected to band together to launch the coalition government but negotiators have wrangled over Cabinet posts, pushing back the government's formation and causing dismay among citizens over the delay.
The lawmakers would work to name Iraq's president and two deputies that day, the statement said. A Kurd, Jalal Talabani, is expected to become president.
Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite Muslim politician likely to be Iraq's next prime minister, said Saturday the country's long-awaited government could be formed "in the coming few days" — an accomplishment that would mark the end of nearly two months of tortured negotiations after the nation's first free elections in a half-century. Iraqi politicians, however, have been reporting they were near a deal for at least a month and previous pronouncements of a National Assembly meeting have not been borne out. |
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