Minister survives deadly day in Mosul

1.00pm - By MAHER AL-THANOON

MOSUL - Guerrillas shot dead a British and a Canadian civilian and ambushed a convoy carrying Iraq's public works minister in a surge of attacks around the increasingly lawless Iraqi city of Mosul on Sunday.

Police and hospital officials said three Iraqi bodyguards were killed and a fourth wounded in the attack on Nesreen Barwari's convoy. She was returning to Mosul from Iraq's Kurdish northern areas when the convoy was attacked.

Barwari was unhurt, police said.

Security has deteriorated sharply in Mosul, 400km north of Baghdad, in recent weeks, further complicating US efforts for an orderly transfer of power to Iraqis in July.

Earlier this month four US missionaries were shot dead in an ambush in the city.

Witnesses said the British and Canadian civilians were ambushed on their way to work at the Mosul East power station.

"They were on their way to the power station in two cars when they came under fire from attackers with AK-47s. One vehicle was hit," said an Iraqi technician.

Officials in Britain and Canada confirmed the nationalities of the victims. The bodies of the two men, wearing blue flak jackets, lay in the road beside their burned-out vehicle long after it was ambushed in an eastern part of the city.

Elsewhere in the city, gunmen opened fire from a car at a US patrol, wounding two American military police, soldiers at the scene said. US troops returned fire, killing all four people in the car. Iraqi police found rocket-propelled grenade launchers and AK-47 assault rifles in the vehicle.

In another attack, insurgents fired two rocket-propelled grenades at a US Stryker military vehicle on patrol in a western district, setting it on fire, witnesses said. A US military spokesman said there were no casualties.

Earlier two employees of the US-run Iraqi Media Network were wounded in a drive-by shooting, a grenade attack wounded a policeman in the city centre and a rocket, apparently aimed at the city hall, hit a nearby boys school, but failed to explode.

Two people were killed and 13 wounded in a rocket attack on the city hall on Saturday.

US officials have said they expect guerrillas to intensify attacks in the run-up to a June 30 handover of power to an interim Iraqi government, whose main task will be to prepare for elections scheduled to take place in early 2005.

Insurgents have increasingly attacked people seen as cooperating with the US-led occupiers, including members of the fledgling Iraqi security forces.

Near Baquba on Sunday, a bomb wounded three children on their way to school and two other civilians when it exploded outside the home of an Iraqi contractor working for the US-led authorities.

At a hospital in the town 65km north of Baghdad, two girls and a boy lay in a stark ward, bandages on their limbs and heads, faces caked with blood.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, two people were wounded when a bomb exploded near a checkpoint on Sunday, police said.

A UN team of electoral experts arrived in Iraq on Friday to advise on organising the polls.

Washington's hopes of winning support for its political plans have been dented by opposition from Iraq's most revered Shi'ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Sistani, hugely influential with Iraq's 60 per cent Shi'ite majority, says a U.S.-backed interim constitution signed by the Iraqi Governing Council this month is flawed and undemocratic.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq