Iraq Shiite leader targeted by assassins
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-02-06 09:50

The revered spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, escaped an assassination bid, his office said, on the eve of a visit by a UN team assessing his demand for direct elections.

Initial reports of the assassination attempt were sketchy, but a source close to Sistani told AFP that a man tried to break into his office to carry out "a criminal act targeting" the ayatollah, but was caught by bodyguards.

The report, which could not be immediately confirmed, contradicted earlier television reports that a group of gunmen sprayed Sistani's car with bullets as the cleric was leaving his office for his home in the pilgrimage city of Najaf, 160 kilometres (100 miles) south of Baghdad.

Sistani's office a short time later confirmed an attack had taken place but offered no further details.

Sistani lives and works in the same compound, patrolled by armed guards, near the holy shrine imam Ali in Najaf.

Shiite politician Muaffak al-Rubei was able to say Sistani was unhurt in the attack, which has the potential to inflame already high tensions between rival religious and ethnic groups in the war-ravaged country, but gave no further details.

"I just met Sayyed Sistani, he is safe and sound," said Rubei, a member of Iraq's US-appointed interim leadership.

"He is surrounded by his relatives who are taking care of him."

Rubei called on fellow Shiites not to hit back against members of the ousted Sunni elite on the assumption that they were responsible for the shooting.

"What I call for now is for there to be no confessional backlash after this assassination attempt. Instead there should be a national response encompassing all of Iraq," he said.

"These violent acts should be condemned against any of our leaders, whether political or spiritual."

The attack notably came just a day before a team of UN experts was expected in Baghdad to assess the feasibility of Sistani's demand for direct elections for Iraq's first post-occupation government to properly reflect his community's demographic weight.

His demands are backed by the rest of the clerical hierarchy as well as the main Shiite religious parties, and prompted the coalition to call in the United Nations to resolve a major obstacle to their timetable for an end to the occupation.

The evaluation team -- the world body's first full-scale mission to the country since it pulled out its international staff after a deadly bombing last year -- was due to arrive here Friday and stay for around 10 days, a European diplomat close to the mission told AFP.

The coalition currently plans to power to an unelected provisional government by the end of June.

Amid growing questions about the US-led coalition's failure to find the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq used to justify the war, Bush said he had no regrets over the action.

"Knowing what I knew then, and knowing what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq," Bush said in an impassioned defense of the March 2003 invasion during a brief trip to South Carolina.

"We have not yet found the stockpiles of weapons that we thought were there," he acknowledged, but "we know Saddam Hussein had the intent to arm his regime with weapons of mass destruction."

The mounting death toll among US troops in Iraq, resistance to the US-backed plan for the transfer to self-rule, and the failure to find the banned arms at the core of his case for war pose an election-year threat to Bush.

In London, Britain's government was forced on the defensive over its pre-war information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction after Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted even he had been in the dark about a key piece of intelligence.

Opposition lawmakers questioned why Blair, who claimed before the war that Iraq could unleash chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes, had not known whether this referred to missiles or shorter-range "battlefield" weapons.

Blair on Wednesday told the House of Commons that even with British troops poised to enter Iraq in March last year to unseat Saddam he had not been clear about this.

It brought a scathing response from the leader of the main opposition Conservative Party, Michael Howard.

"If I were prime minister and I had failed to ask that basic question before committing our country to war I would be seriously considering my position," Howard said.

The US military meanwhile confirmed that one soldier had been killed and another wounded in a Baghdad mortar attack.

"One Combined Joint Task Force Seven soldier was killed and another was wounded at approximately 2:15 pm (1115 GMT) in a mortar attack at a checkpoint outside of Baghdad International Airport," said the US army in a press release.