Pipeline Blast Cuts Iraq Exports Via Turkey As Oil Prices Hit Record High

BAGHDAD, Aug 3 (AFP) - Saboteurs blasted an Iraqi oil pipeline, fueling fears that sent oil prices to a record high late Tuesday, while a US military hearing got underway into the Abu Ghraib prison abuses and eight people were killed in unrest around Iraq.
A bomb planted near a network of pipelines at Al-Fateha, west of Kirkuk, at dawn damaged the main pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, bringing exports to a halt, said Nasir Qassim, an official with the state-owned Northern Oil Company.
The road connecting the Kirkuk oil region with the refineries in Beiji was cut off as emergency workers battled to extinguish the raging flames and thick black smoke.
The attack helped send oil prices to record highs amid broad concerns about production capacity.
In the United States, a military hearing opened into the case of Private Lynndie England, the young soldier who hit headlines after disturbing digital photographs of her and fellow US soldiers shown abusing Iraqi detainees in late 2003 were released to the media.
In many of the images, the detainees were naked, and in some pictures, the prisoners had been forced into piles of bodies.
She could face up to 38 years in a military prison if convicted of assaulting detainees, conspiring to mistreat them, committing indecent acts and disobeying orders. Her lawyers claim the US government is trying to use England as a scapegoat.
A heavily pregnant England, 21, appeared at the first part of the hearing in Fort Bragg, North Carolina on Tuesday to determine whether she should face a court-martial for her actions at Abu Ghraib prison.
In Baghdad and Mosul, Christians buried the victims of deadly coordinated attacks on five churches Sunday that killed at least 10 people.
Three Iraqi national guardsmen were killed when a suicide bomber blew up a car at a checkpoint on a road into the northern city of Baquba, wounding another six guardsmen, security and hospital sources said.
"A car drove up to the Sabtiyah checkpoint and before the national guardsmen could search it the driver blew up the vehicle," said police Captain Sabah Nassif Jassem.
Rescuers also found the remains of a body that appeared to be that of the bomber, less than a week after a massive suicide attack in Baquba killed 70.
The latest US fatalities, announced by the military, raised to some 680 the number of American troops killed in combat since the invasion of Iraq was launched in March 2003, according to a Pentagon tally.
Two marines died of wounds sustained in the volatile Al-Anbar province, while conducting what the American military described as "security and stability operations".
Another two soldiers were killed in Baghdad late Monday, while yet another marine died from accidental gunshot wounds in Najaf.
In Baghdad, district police chief Colonel Moyad Bashar al-Shamari was killed on his way to work when his car ran over a makeshift bomb near the Abu Jafaar al-Mansur Square.
Separately, a French aid group confirmed that four Iraqi employees in the southern city of Samawa were killed while travelling to Najaf.
The bodies were found in a cemetery in Najaf on Monday with multiple stab wounds and one of them had his eyes gouged out, a relative said.
In the Shiite holy city of Najaf late Monday, an Iraqi woman was killed and nine other people wounded in clashes between US troops and loyalists of Moqtada Sadr outside the radical Shiite cleric's home.
A Sadr spokesman accused US troops of seeking to arrest the wanted cleric and of trying to plunge Shiite cities back into chaos following a deadly standoff between Sadr's militia and US-led forces earlier this year.
Just three days after the arrest of Sheikh Mithal al-Hasnawi, Sadr's representative in Karbala, it was the most serious incident between US troops and Sadr's militiamen since a truce in early June that ended the fighting.
Meanwhile, in Iraq's hostage-taking saga, Amman said that another Jordanian has been kidnapped in Iraq, bringing to seven the number of Jordanians held in the strife-torn country.
Kidnappers holding Lebanese businessman Antoine Antoun in Iraq have also been in touch with one of his employees over their conditions for his release, a member of the man's family told AFP.
A former Lebanese minister, Fawzi Hobeish, said the kidnappers wanted a ransom payment, but he gave no amount. "All the current contacts show there is a ransom demand and that the kidnapping has no political element," he said.
Jordan's King Abdullah II told Al-Arabiya satellite channel that he was prepared to send troops to Iraq if Baghdad requested an Arab force to replace US-led multinational forces.
But a previously unknown militant group Tawhid warned Saudi Arabia not to follow through on such a proposal, threatening attacks if its warning was not heeded.
Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin meanwhile said he wanted to create a truth and reconciliation commission for Iraq, modelled on the experiences of post-apartheid South Africa.
Such a commission, "based on confessions and pardons, would be a way to strengthen the feeling of national unity", Amin told AFP, following his return from talks in Amman with UN agencies.