BAGHDAD, Jan 15 (AFP) - The bodies of four Iraqis employed by a foreign contractor were discovered Saturday and mortars pounded a police station outside Baghdad's Green Zone, underscoring the threat of violence on the country's election day at the end of the month.
A US military policeman, Specialist Charles Graner, 36, seen as the ringleader of prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib prison scandal awaited sentencing Saturday after a military jury found him guilty of beating and sexually abusing Iraqi detainees.
With Iraq's polling date barely two weeks away, a tentative deal was reached in the multi-ethnic powderkeg of Kirkuk for displaced Kurds to participate in provincial elections, averting a potential boycott by the main Kurdish political parties.
But it was unclear if the agreement would end simmering tensions or could spell further troubles down the line between Kurds and Arabs in the city that sits atop some of Iraq's lucrative oil assets.
The bullet-riddled corpses of four Iraqis working with a foreign company, were discovered near Kut south of Baghdad Saturday, drawing attention once again to the high level of power exercised by rebels across central Iraq.
The dead were identified as an Iraqi businessman and three of his workers who had been threatened for working with a foreeign company, police said.
The bodies were dumped near the town of Al-Suweira where insurgents have set up checkpoints and carried out attacks, about 60 kilometres south of Baghdad, in a region with a mix of Shiites and Sunni Arabs.
A six-year-old girl and three others were wounded when US troops opened fire on the car behind them after they came under fire on the highway northeast of Kut, south of Baghdad, one of the injured told AFP from his hospital bed.
In Baghdad, two mortars struck a heavily fortified police station just outside the Green Zone, home to the interim Iraqi government and the US embassy, a witness said. Smoke billowed into the sky and police sealed off the street.
At least two civilians were wounded, medical sources told AFP.
A car bomb in front of the same police station one month ago killed four and left 49 wounded.
As bloodshed mounted, a US general admitted US troops could not guarantee safety across the capital on the January 30 election date.
"There are places here that are ugly. There are other places looking pretty dog-gone good," Brigadier General Jeffrey Hammond, deputy commander of US troops in the capital, told reporters Friday.
A senior American official told AFP that sections of western and northern Baghdad, including the Sunni Muslim Adhamiya district, would probably have low turnout due to insurgent threats.
Voter registration forms were not even handed out in some sections of Baghdad, the official added.
In the latest assault on the polls, insurgents set off a bomb Friday in a voting center in Sharqat, a town with a strong rebel presence north of Baghdad, badly damaging it, police said.
No one was in the center at the time of the blast, the second there in two months.
Sharqat falls within Salahuddin province in the Sunni Muslim heartland, where people's fears of living under the rule of the country's long-oppressed Shiite majority have allowed rebels to gain a stronghold and mount attacks.
Gunmen shot dead late Thursday another member of Iraq's electoral commission, west of Baghdad, an interior ministry official said on Friday.
He was the eighth electoral official to be killed in the run-up to the poll planned for January 30.
In another act of intimidation by insurgents, gunmen kidnapped 15 Iraqi soldiers off their bus Friday after the troops finished work at the Al-Asad US military base in the lawless western province of Al-Anbar.
In a further threat to already faltering hopes for widespread voter turnout, the Islamic Army of Iraq roundly denounced in an Internet statement the concept of democracy, saying it deviated from the precepts of sharia, or Islamic law.
Meanwhile, Kurdish parties reached an informal agreement to participate in the elections in Kirkuk after Iraq's electoral commission agreed to count people on the voting rolls who were displaced under Saddam Hussein, electoral board spokesman Farid Ayar said.
The move awaited approval from the Kurdish parliament and it was not clear whether the breakthrough would calm Kirkuk or aggravate tensions among ethnic groups.
A military jury in Texas found Specialist Charles Graner guilty Friday of beating detainees, piling them naked atop each other and forcing them to masturbate at Abu Ghraib prison.
Graner said he planned to address the 10 military jurors before they deliver their sentence against him, which could put him behind bars for up to 15 years.
The Abu Ghraib scandal has put a stain on the US record in Iraq and has raised serious questions about US military interrogation procedures around the world.
01/15/2005 10:14 GMT - AFP