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Spokesman: Chalabi is in Iraq - somewhere

BAGHDAD - Ahmed Chalabi, a formerly exiled political leader who had been supported by the Pentagon, returned to Iraq on Wednesday to face arrest on charges of counterfeiting currency, his spokesman said.

Chalabi returned from neighboring Iran by car on Wednesday afternoon and drove to an undisclosed location within Iraq, said the spokesman, Haidar Moussawi.

"I cannot tell you where he is at the moment, but he is here in Iraq," Moussawi said.

The chief investigating judge of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq issued an arrest warrant for Chalabi on Saturday after a police search of his house in May produced alleged counterfeit currency.

Chalabi has denied the charges, saying that the notes were samples used for a meeting with Iraq's Central Bank in his capacity as chairman of the finance committee of the Iraqi Governing Council, the U.S. appointed authority that dissolved when the interim Iraqi government took power on June 28. Chalabi has accused the judge, Zuhair al-Maliky, of acting at the behest of the U.S. government.

In Washington, U.S. lawyers for Chalabi filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Jordanian government of illegally seizing Chalabi's bank in 1989 and framing him on embezzlement charges to stop him from exposing illegal arms sales to Saddam Hussein.

Maliky also has issued an arrest warrant for Chalabi's nephew, Salem Chalabi, in the murder of a top Finance Ministry official who was looking into whether the Chalabis were illegally occupying Iraqi government property. It was unclear Wednesday when he would return to Iraq from London.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Iraqi security forces should grow by 50,000 trained and equipped personnel during the next three or four months, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said as he acknowledged the forces have had a mixed record in battle.

Some Iraqi units are simply unequipped to take on heavily armed insurgents, the defense secretary said during a trip this week to Oman and Afghanistan. Still, they are going on joint patrols with U.S. forces more frequently.

"It shows they are not hiding in their barracks," Rumsfeld said.

He said about 110,000 security and military forces have received complete equipment sets and training. That's slightly more than half of the 206,000 people who have been recruited.

CAIRO - An Islamic Web site carried a videotape Wednesday that appeared to show militants in Iraq beheading a man identified as a CIA agent. The authenticity of the videotape could not be verified immediately.

The Associated Press, quoting a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity, reported that CIA officials have accounted for all employees and no one is missing.