IRAQ: Insurgents mounted a major ambush in Baghdad yesterday, killing up to 10 people and kidnapping one and possibly two African engineers in a second co-ordinated attack in the capital in as many days.
There was no word on the fate of the telephone engineers from Malawi and Madagascar after gunmen swarmed onto a busy street to trap the armed convoy in which they were travelling.
Police said the Malawian had definitely been seized but it was unclear what had happened to his colleague.
The trial of Saddam Hussein was thrown into fresh confusion when the commission charged with rooting out Saddam's Baath party followers from positions of power said the newly-named chief judge was being investigated and should be barred.
The US-sponsored trial has already been rocked by the killings of two defence lawyers, accusations of sectarian and ethnic bias and the resignation of the previous chief judge, who complained politicians accused him of being soft on Saddam.
President Jalal Talabani urged the Sunni Arab minority, whose community has fostered the insurgency, to drop complaints about last month's election and start negotiating for places in a coalition government once final results come out this week.
He expressed hope that consensus politics could end the violence that has blighted the country since US forces ousted Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government in 2003, but there was no sign of a quick end to the bloodshed and kidnappings.
The kidnappers of American journalist Jill Carroll released a video of her and demanded the release of women prisoners. Another high-profile abduction ended with the freeing of a sister of the Interior Minister, two weeks after she was seized.
Diplomatic negotiations continued with Iran over an incident in which Iraqi officials accused Iranian forces of "kidnapping" nine Iraqi coastguards on their tidal waterway frontier in the south.
Having previously denied knowledge of it, Iran said Iraqi vessels had encroached on its territorial waters.
Compounding Iraq's many problems, the relatively peaceful northern region of Kurdistan was struck with fear of the deadly human strain of the bird flu virus when officials said they were testing samples after the death of a 14-year-old girl.
Officials said masked gunmen killed up to 10 security guards and kidnapped the Malawian barely 12 hours after an armed band attacked the compound of a firm supplying food to the Iraqi army in the capital, killing seven Iraqis.
The Malawian engineer and a Madagascan colleague, both employees of a local, Egyptian-owned mobile telephone operator, were travelling from home to work, their employer said.
As their convoy of three or four vehicles drove down the main street in the Nafaq al-Shurta area, "a large number" of gunmen hiding in buildings opened fire as other attackers drove out of side streets, an Interior Ministry official said.