BAGHDAD (Reuters):
INSURGENTS MOUNTED a major ambush in Baghdad yesterday, killing up to 10 people and kidnapping one and possibly two African engineers in a second coordinated attack in the capital in as many days.
There was no word on the fate of the telephone engineers from Malawi and Madagascar after gunmen swarmed on to a busy street to trap the armed convoy in which they were travelling.
Police said the Malawian had definitely been seized but it was unclear what had happened to his colleague.
The trial of Saddam Hussein was thrown into fresh confusion when the commission charged with rooting out Saddam's Baath party followers from positions of power said the newly-named chief judge was being investigated and should be barred.
The U.S.-sponsored trial has already been rocked by the killings of two defence lawyers, accusations of sectarian and ethnic bias and the resignation of the previous chief judge, who complained politicians accused him of being soft on Saddam.
President Jalal Talabani urged the Sunni Arab minority, whose community has fostered the insurgency, to drop complaints about last month's election and start negotiating for places in a coalition government once final results come out this week.
He expressed hope that consensus politics could end the violence that has blighted the country since U.S. forces ousted Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government in 2003, but there was no sign of a quick end to the bloodshed and kidnappings.
The kidnappers of an American journalist released a video of her and demanded the release of women prisoners. Another high-profile abduction ended with the freeing of a sister of the Interior Minister, two weeks after she was seized.
Diplomatic negotiations continued with Iran over an incident in which Iraqi officials accused Iranian forces of "kidnapping" nine Iraqi coastguards on their tidal waterway frontier in the south. Having previously denied knowledge of it, Iran said Iraqi vessels had encroached on its territorial waters.
Compounding Iraq's many problems, the relatively peaceful northern region of Kurdistan was struck with fear of the deadly human strain of the bird flu virus when officials said they were testing samples after the death of a 14-year-old girl.
AMBUSH
Witnesses and officials said masked gunmen killed at least nine Iraqis and kidnapped the Malawian barely 12 hours after an armed band attacked the compound of a firm supplying food to the Iraqi army in the capital, killing seven Iraqis.
The Malawian engineer and a Madagascan colleague, both employees of a local, Egyptian-owned mobile telephone operator, were travelling from home to work, their employer said.
As their convoy of three or four vehicles drove down the main street in the Nafaq al-Shurta area, "a large number" of gunmen hiding in buildings opened fire as other attackers drove out of side streets, an Interior Ministry official said.
A Reuters cameraman counted nine bodies in the hospital morgue. The Interior Ministry source said 10 security guards had been killed in the ambush and up to three people kidnapped.
U.S. forces in Iraq said they were holding eight women among some 14,000 guerrilla suspects after the abductors of American journalist Jill Carroll threatened to kill her if the authorities did not free all Iraqi women within 72 hours.
Arabic television station Al Jazeera aired a brief, silent video late on Tuesday of the 28-year-old reporter, the first glimpse of her since she was grabbed by gun from her car on Jan. 7 in an attack in which her translator was shot dead.
Another prominent hostage was free after a two-week ordeal. Interior Ministry sources said a sister of Interior Minister Bayan Jabor, a Shi'ite Islamist and hate figure for Sunni militants, had been released and was safe after police closed in on the kidnappers.
Talabani urged Sunni leaders to drop demands for a rerun of the election and accept final results, due on Friday, in order to start negotiating with his Kurdish bloc and the dominant Shi'ites for places in a grand coalition.
A senior Iraqi official denounced the new chief judge in the trial of Saddam as a member of the former president's banned Baath party who should be barred from office.
"(Sayeed) al-Hamashi is the object of a debaathification inquiry," Ali Faisal, executive manager of the independent Debaathification Commission, told Reuters. "His presence in this court violates the statutes ... and he must be replaced."
He said Hamashi's position at the court only came to the Commission's notice when he was named this week.
Iraq was also facing the prospect of an outbreak of the human strain of the deadly bird flu virus for the first time after a 14-year-old Kurdish girl from a village near the Turkish and Iranian borders died of fever.
