BAGHDAD - An Iraqi general was kidnapped in Baghdad Tuesday while a series of bombs killed a civilian and a US soldier, as talks on forming a new government dragged on more than two months after historic elections.
The commander of an interior ministry armoured brigade, Brigadier General Jalal Mohammed Salah was seized with an undetermined number of bodyguards in the upmarket residential district of Mansur, a ministry official said.
It was the latest in a spate of kidnappings and ambushes to hit Iraq's security forces which are being groomed by Washington to clear the way for the exit of coalition troops.
South of Baghdad, in the so-called triangle of death, police found a mass grave containing the beheaded bodies of 10 Iraqi soldiers.
The corpses found in Jurf al-Sahar, some 60 kilometres (nearly 40 miles) outside the capital, displayed signs of torture, Lieutenant Yahya Salim said.
In Baghdad, a US soldier was killed, and three men and a six-year-old girl wounded, in a bombing in the restive Dura district, medical sources and the US military said.
Another two blasts around the capital killed a civilian and wounded six, security sources said.
A Sunni cleric was gunned down in a drive-by shooting while a policeman was killed in a raid in which two suspected insurgents were wounded and captured, security sources said.
South of the capital, a municipal councillor in the mainly Shiite city of Hilla was killed in another drive-by shooting.
In the main northern city of Mosul, four Iraqis, one of them a child, were wounded by a roadside bomb and small arms fire aimed at a passing US military convoy.
On Monday, two US soldiers and an Iraqi comrade were killed in an intense firefight with rebels northeast of Baghdad, while a US marine was killed in the restive western province of Al-Anbar, the military revealed.
The persistent violence came as bickering continued over the allocation of posts in a new government, with the small number of Sunni Arab politicians elected to parliament unable to agree on a common candidate for the vice presidency.
The heir to the deposed monarchy Sherif Ali bin Hussein, outgoing president Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, and octagenarian elder statesman have all expressed an interest in the post.
"Things are going badly, people are pushing in different directions," said Banyan al-Jarba, an aide to Sherif Ali.
The majority Shiites and second-placed Kurds have agreed to reserve the vice presidency for the ousted Sunni Arab elite, which dominated all Iraqi governments before the 2003 invasion, in a bid to stem its support for anti-US insurgents and return it to the political mainstream.
The International Committee of the Red Cross meanwhile demanded an investigation into a riot at the US-run Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq.
"We are asking the US army to investigate the cause of the riot which happened at the detention centre," ICRC spokeswoman Rana Sidani told AFP.
The US military said 12 prisoners and four US guards were wounded in Friday's riot at Iraq's largest US-run prison.
The riot at the desert camp, where more than 6,000 prisoners are held, was first reported by aides of Shiite radical leader Moqtada Sadr, some of whose supporters are held there.
The ICRC spokeswoman said at least 14 detainees were lightly wounded, and possibly more, when US soldiers fired rubber bullets to end the riot, which happened as an ICRC delegation visited the camp.
She warned that a tense atmosphere persisted in the prison.
"Many of the detainees complained they were not aware of the reasons for their internment or its duration. The Americans consider them 'security detainees'. There is no clear trial or legal process. In this climate, it takes one incident to ignite things," Sidani said.
Camp Bucca was the site of a huge riot in January that spread through four compounds, housing more than 2,000 detainees, and ended with US soldiers firing into a crowd and killing four detainees.
The latest mutiny comes almost a year after details emerged of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that sullied the reputation of the US detention system in Iraq.
04/05/2005 13:19 GMT