Iraq

Soldier dies after twin attacks

TIKRIT, Iraq - Simultaneous attacks on U.S. troops Saturday at two locations killed one soldier and left five injured.

The two attacks in the hometown of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein occurred around 2:40 a.m. local time. In one, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded within the walls of the Civilian Military Operations Center, injuring five 4th Infantry Division soldiers. The injured were evacuated and were reported in stable condition at a military hospital.

At the same time about a block away, unknown assailants fired on a police station jointly staffed by U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police officers. One soldier was shot in the face and died a short time later.

In both cases, soldiers returned fire. A white van carrying a woman and two men, one of whom appeared to have a bandaged head, was spotted leaving the scene of the CMOC attack. Soldiers began searching for the vehicle and checking local hospitals.

In a third incident at about the same time, gunmen shot at a passing Apache helicopter in north Tikrit. The helicopter's crew returned fire.

Tikrit is about 120 miles north of Baghdad. Saturday's death was at least the seventh of a U.S. soldier in attacks in Iraq in the past two weeks.

On Friday, a U.S. soldier died and two were wounded in a road accident about 20 miles north of Baghdad.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The world-famous treasures of Nimrud, unaccounted for since Baghdad fell two months ago, have been found in good condition in the country's Central Bank - in a secret vault-inside-a-vault submerged in sewage water, U.S. occupation authorities said Saturday.

They also said fewer than 50 items from the collection of the Iraqi National Museum's main exhibition are missing after the looting and destruction that followed the U.S. capture of Baghdad.

The artifacts - gold earrings, finger and toe rings, necklaces, plates, bowls and flasks, many of them elaborately engraved and set with semiprecious stones or enamel - were found Thursday when the vault was opened, the Coalition Provisional Authority said. The artifacts were largely unscathed.

The Nimrud treasures date back to about 900 B.C. They were discovered by Iraqi archaeologists in the late 1980s in four royal tombs at the site of the ancient city of Nimrud near Mosul in northern Iraq.

The treasures, one of the 20th century's most significant archaeological finds, have not been seen in public since the early 1990s. Their discovery will help assuage archaeologists' worries about the country's ancient treasures.

Of the 170,000 artifacts thought to be missing, 3,000 remain unaccounted for, most not worthy of museum exhibition. A coalition official said 47 main exhibition items are missing and that 64 pieces from that collection had been looted.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A leading Shiite Muslim party said Saturday it would not join a political council to help rule Iraq if its members were appointed by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq was the first political group to say it would boycott the proposed framework for an interim administration.

"We can't be part of an appointed administration," Hamid al-Bayati of the council said, adding that he had conveyed the group's decision to Bremer's aides last week.

The group is one of two religious parties seeking to speak for the majority Shiite population in Iraq. The other is the more secular Daawa Party.

All the groups have pressed Bremer to allow Iraqis to select an interim government, but none had flatly stated a refusal to join the body that Bremer has envisioned, a 25- to 30-member council appointed by him.

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