- BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Insurgents
attacked U.S. Army convoys in three areas, killing one soldier and wounding
three others Sunday, witnesses and the U.S. command said.
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- Elsewhere, a U.N. team met with Iraqi leaders Sunday
to discuss the chances of holding early legislative elections, and its
leader pledged to do "everything possible" to help the country
regain its sovereignty.
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- Meanwhile, a bomb planted inside a police station killed
three policemen and injured 11 others on Saturday, officials said. In southeastern
Iraq, about 90 Japanese soldiers began their controversial humanitarian
mission. They are the first Japanese troops in a combat zone since World
War II.
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- Also, Prince Charles made a surprise visit to British
troops in the southern city of Basra on Sunday amid tight security, the
first member of the royal family to visit the country since the ouster
of Saddam Hussein.
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- Charles - wearing desert camouflage combats, sturdy boots
and a black beret - met more than 200 soldiers from the 2nd Battalion of
the Parachute Regiment and thanked them for their work in Iraq.
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- Elsewhere, Iraqi workers unearthed a mass grave containing
the remains of at least 50 people.
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- U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and his team held talks for
about two hours with members of the U.S.-installed Governing Council on
the second day of a mission to break the impasse between the United States
and the country's influential Shiite Muslim clergy on the blueprint for
transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis.
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- "The U.N. can only emphasize its wish to do everything
possible to help the Iraqi people with all their sects and components to
come out from their long plight and to help them regain independence and
sovereignty," said Brahimi, who is Secretary-General Kofi Annan's
special adviser on Iraq.
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- A senior Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity,
said the team would stay here about 10 days.
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- "We are here to see what kind of mechanism the Iraqis
feel is more appropriate to their country," the team's spokesman,
Ahmed Fawzi, said.
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- The United Nations withdrew its international staff from
Iraq last year following two attacks against their headquarters. The Aug.
19 truck bombing killed 22 people, including the top envoy, Sergio Vieira
de Mello.
-
- The team members were expected to travel to the Shiite
holy city of Najaf to meet Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani,
whose demand for early elections threatens to torpedo U.S. plans for transferring
power to Iraqis by July 1.
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- Al-Sistani opposes the American plan to appoint the legislature
through 18 regional caucuses. The legislature will choose a new sovereign
government to take office by July 1.
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- Also Sunday, Ahmad Chalabi, a Westernized Shiite politician
with close Pentagon links, met with al-Sistani for about 90 minutes in
Najaf, and said the U.N. team could be persuaded that early elections were
possible.
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- Although the Shiites are pressing for an early ballot,
many leading Sunni Muslims fear an election under U.S. occupation would
produce a government dominated by majority Shiites, who were suppressed
for generations by Iraq's Sunni Arab minority.
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- The Governing Council president, Mohsen Abdel-Hamid,
said Sunday's talks with the U.N. team covered "all forms of an election
that are adequate to bring about a representative government."
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- The United States and its Governing Council allies say
elections cannot be held under the current unstable security conditions.
They also cite the lack of proper census or electoral rolls.
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- In the latest violence, a U.S. soldier was killed Sunday
by a roadside bomb near Mahmudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, a military
spokesman said. No other details were available.
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- Another roadside bomb in Fallujah west of Baghdad injured
two soldiers, witnesses said. In the northern city of Mosul, a U.S. convoy
was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade Sunday, and one soldier was wounded,
witnesses said.
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- On Saturday, a bomb exploded inside a police station,
killing three policemen and wounding 11 others, in Suwayrah town, 30 miles
south of Baghdad, police Lt. Odai Salman Abed said Sunday.
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- A heavily armored convoy of Japanese troops arrived from
Kuwait on Sunday in Samawah, marking Japan's first military deployment
to a combat zone since 1945.
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- The ground troops, most of them engineers, were leading
a deployment that will eventually reach about 800 soldiers in a humanitarian
mission to improve water supplies and other infrastructure projects around
Samawah in southeastern Iraq.
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- On Sunday, workers alerted by farmers to human bones
sticking out of the ground in Kifai, near the southern Shiite town of Najaf,
unearthed a mass grave holding the skulls and smashed bones of about 50
people.
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- Haitham al-Issawi, a local Shiite cleric supervising
the digging, said the grave apparently dated back to the 1991 Shiite uprising
that was crushed by Saddam Hussein's forces.
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- Since the fall of Saddam's regime, several mass graves
of Shiites have been discovered in southern Iraq. Although a majority,
Shiites were brutally suppressed by Saddam's Sunni-dominated government.
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- "We ask those who defend Saddam, where did these
bodies come from," al-Issawi said.
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- - Associated Press reporter Hamza Hendawi in Baghdad,
Iraq, contributed to this report
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- Copyright © 2004 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority
of The Associated Press.
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