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Reports differ on whether assassins targeted Iraqi cleric

BAGHDAD - The foremost Shiite Muslim cleric in Iraq reportedly survived an assassination attempt Thursday, but details were murky and it was unclear how serious the incident might have been.

At least one statement by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani's office confirmed the attack, but others later denied it.

U.S. officials said they had investigated the reports and concluded no attempt took place.

However, a member of Iraq's Governing Council and a top aide to another council member said they had been told Sistani had been targeted by assassins.

Mowafak Rabii, a Shiite member of the council, said sources told him there had been an assassination attempt but he had seen Sistani afterward and the 75-year-old cleric was "fine and in good health."

Abdul Adel Mehdi, a top aide to Abdelaziz Hakim, another Shiite council member, confirmed that in a meeting Thursday, "We were briefed that there was an attempt on the life of Ayatollah Sistani, an attempt to assassinate him. But I don't know whether his attackers were caught." Mehdi added that the people who told him had direct contact with Sistani's office.

Sistani, he said, was alive and "now in a safe place."

The two Governing Council sources indicated the attack occurred Thursday morning in the holy city Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad.

Sistani lives and works in the heart of the city in modest quarters along a narrow alley. He rarely, if ever, leaves his home because of fears that he will be assassinated. He and his son, who is his closest aide, were targets of at least one assassination attempt in 1996.

Still, Sistani and many other Shiite clerics maintain an open-door policy so that any one of the faithful can come to make an appointment or consult about problems great and small. The line outside Sistani's office often winds around the corner.

As the foremost religious leader of Iraq's Shiites, who account for at least 60 percent of the population, Sistani has pushed for elections to choose a transitional government that would take over at the end of June. In January, tens of thousands of Shiites took to the streets to back his call for elections.

BAGHDAD - U.S. and Iraqi forces captured more than 100 suspected guerrillas in raids across the country, arresting one of Saddam Hussein's intelligence chiefs and another Iraqi believed involved in a suicide bombing last month, a U.S. commander said Thursday.

American forces are also tracking a shadowy militant group, the Ansar al-Sunna Army, that claimed responsibility for Sunday's back-to-back suicide bombings, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt. The bombings, which devastated gatherings at Kurdish political offices in the northern city of Irbil, killed at least 109 people, including senior Kurdish politicians who were strong U.S. allies.

The military counted a few high-level rebel suspects in a string of recent arrests.

Chief among them was former Brig. Gen. Abu Aymad, who was head of military intelligence in northern Iraq under Hussein's regime, Kimmitt said. Aymad, believed to have commanded a guerrilla cell, was arrested along with three others near Tikrit Thursday.

On Wednesday, U.S. forces captured Majid Ali Abbas, suspected of coordinating a suicide truck bombing Jan. 24 in Samarra.

LONDON - Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative Party of Britain, on Thursday called on Prime Minister Tony Blair to resign, saying Blair failed to ask fundamental questions about Saddam Hussein's weapons before taking the country into war.