| Title corrected per request. |
Police rounded up dozens of suspects on Monday after twin suicide car bombings killed 66 people in Iraq's Shi'ite holy cities, attacks that intensified fears of sectarian violence during elections on Jan. 30. In Najaf, scene of the deadlier of Sunday's coordinated attacks, the governor said police had seized 50 suspects. Police detained five more in Kerbala, site of the other blast, but were cautious about saying they were close to the culprits. A roadside bomb exploded on Monday in Kerbala, briefly raising concerns of a copy-cat strike. Four Iraqis were wounded, none of them seriously, police said. Najaf governor Adnan al-Zurfi, appointed by U.S. authorities, gave reporters few details about those in custody, but said at least one held a passport from another Arab country. The streets of Najaf were almost empty on Monday apart from frequent funeral processions, some passing close to where people continued to sift through the rubble of Sunday's blast.
In another attack on Sunday that sent an obvious message to the Electoral Commission and potential voters, gunmen shot dead three Commission employees in a daylight ambush in Baghdad. Electoral Commission officials and candidates gathering to choose the ballot order on Monday held a minute's silence to remember those killed in the three attacks. As they met, gunmen in the north killed two members of a party set up by a former intelligence chief who turned against Saddam.
Iraq's Shi'ite leaders urged their followers to remain calm. "The aim is to sow sectarian division and defer the election process ... Iraqis will defeat those aims," said Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the most powerful Shi'ite electoral bloc. Sunni leaders and clerics echoed that call, denouncing the bombings as the work of extremists who had no role in Iraq.
Monday's ceremony in Baghdad to choose the order in which parties and blocs appear on the ballot was attended by more than 200 people clearly eager for the elections. About 7,000 candidates are signed up to stand and 6,000 voting stations, protected by local security forces and manned by Iraqi monitors, will be set up nationwide. The vote is for a 275-seat national assembly that will help form a government and write a permanent constitution before another election is held in December 2005.
International elections experts created a new body on Monday to help prepare for and evaluate the vote in Iraq, but ruled out sending in large numbers of foreign observers because of the violence, officials said. They said the International Mission for Iraqi Elections would oversee efforts to register expatriate voters and political parties, as well as make contact with domestic monitoring organizations. "We're calling this an assessment mission ... it's not an observer mission," Canada's chief electoral officer, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, told a news conference.