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World

Prisoners' releases fail to unify

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 12, 2006

BAGHDAD - U.S. and Iraqi authorities released more than 200 prisoners Sunday in an ongoing bid to promote national unity, but that effort faltered as Sunni Arabs demanded more releases and the Shiite-controlled Parliament locked in stalemate.

Sunni Arab Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi congratulated dozens of inmates waiting at the Abu Ghraib detention center west of Baghdad to board buses carrying them to freedom. He urged the Shiite-led government to free more prisoners and demanded compensation for them.

"We will continue the release of detainees until the last Iraqi prisoner is set free," Hashimi said, addressing the inmates lined up behind a wire fence, many holding Korans and prayer rugs.

"And this campaign won't stop at U.S. prisons but (will continue) to the prisons run by the Interior and Defense ministries."

A suicide car bomber slammed into a checkpoint near the city of Baqubah, killing at least eight people and wounding four. Al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in that area by a U.S. airstrike Wednesday.

The car-bomb victims - seven Iraqi soldiers and one civilian - were among nearly 40 people killed nationwide as militants signaled the insurgency would continue despite the death of Iraq's most-feared terrorist.

Insurgents elsewhere set a fire in a vegetable market and engaged in a gunbattle with British soldiers. Five civilians were killed and more than a dozen hurt by the crossfire in the southern city of Amarah. A British soldier also was wounded.

Police Capt. Hussein Karim said insurgents started the blaze in the market to draw the troops into an ambush. But the British Defense Ministry said soldiers were sent to search the suspected launch site of a rocket attack and came under small-arms fire.

The 230 detainees being released Sunday from U.S.-run prisons around the country were the second wave of 2,500 detainees that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had promised to release by June 30. The first batch of 594 was freed Wednesday.

"I'm not thinking about myself right now. I'm thinking about the thousands who are still here," said Abdul Kareem Yassin Amash, clutching an envelope with $170 given to him by Hashimi's Iraqi Islamic Party.

The 38-year-old former pilot, who said he was arrested just over a year ago in Mosul, said he did not know why he had been detained and expressed concern that it could happen again.

Lt. Col. Kier-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for U.S. military detainee operations, said 14,300 people remained in coalition detention facilities.

Maliki's new security team, meanwhile, moved ahead with a plan to restore security in Baghdad, which has suffered the most from suicide attackers, roadside bombs and sectarian death squads.

Iraq's government faced a new stalemate as the Parliament was forced to postpone its session to give the main political blocs more time to agree on the powers of the Sunni Arab Parliament speaker. Maliki met with party representatives Saturday but failed to break the deadlock.

[Last modified June 12, 2006, 06:05:15]