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BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraqi officials said
Wednesday they must recount votes from about 300
ballot boxes because of various discrepancies,
delaying final results from the landmark national
elections. Hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of other
ballots were declared invalid because of alleged
tampering.
Postelection violence mounted, raising fears that
the Jan. 30 balloting had done little to ease the
country's grave security crisis.
An American soldier was killed Wednesday and another
wounded in an ambush north of the capital, the U.S.
military said. Two other American soldiers died
earlier in the week, the command said Wednesday.
Gunmen ambushed a convoy of Kurdish party officials
in Baghdad, killing one and wounding four. And in
the southern city of Basra, gunmen killed an Iraqi
journalist working for a U.S.-funded TV station and
his 3-year-old son as they left their home.
On Thursday, a car bomb exploded in central Baghdad,
killing at least four people, police and witnesses
said.
Officials had promised final results from the
elections by Thursday, the end of the Iraqi work
week. On Wednesday, however, election commission
spokesman Farid Ayar said the deadline would not be
met because of the recount.
``We don't know when this will finish,'' he said.
``This will lead to a little postponement in
announcing the results.''
No partial tallies have been released since Monday
in the contests for the 275-member National
Assembly, 18 provincial councils and a regional
parliament for the Kurdish self-governing region in
the north.
The most recent figures showed a coalition of
Kurdish parties in second place behind a
Shiite-dominated ticket endorsed by Iraq's most
revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
The ticket of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a
secular Shiite, was a distant third.
Allegations of voting irregularities, especially
around the tense northern city of Mosul, have
complicated the count. Some leading Sunni Arab and
Christian politicians alleged that thousands of
their supporters were denied the right to vote.
Election officials blamed the problems in the Mosul
area on security, which prevented fewer than a third
of the planned 330 polling centers from opening.
Gunmen seized some ballot boxes, officials said.
The commission would not say how many ballots had
been declared invalid and whether they had come from
the Mosul area, which has a mostly Sunni Arab
population. Many Sunnis are believed to have stayed
home on election day, either because they feared
insurgent reprisals or opposed a ballot as long as
U.S. and other foreign troops were on Iraqi soil.
Commission official Adel al-Lami said the ballots in
40 boxes and 250 bags would not be counted because
they appeared to have been stuffed inside them or,
in some cases, improperly folded. Some of the boxes
were not those approved by the commission, and
others were improperly sealed, he said.
Before the election, commission officials estimated
each box should contain about 500 ballots. It was
unclear whether the bags contained roughly the same
number of ballots. A total of 90,000 ballot boxes
were used in the election.
Meanwhile, a Western legal expert said investigative
judges were nearly ready to hand over lengthy
dossiers of affidavits, witness statements and other
documents to a five-judge panel that would run the
trials for former members of Saddam Hussein's
regime.
The expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity,
would not say which of Saddam's 11 lieutenants were
likely to face the Iraqi Special Tribunal first, and
it was unclear when the dictator himself would stand
trial.
Formal charges will not come until the investigating
judges refer the cases to the trial chamber. The
first dossiers were expected to be delivered to
trial judges in several weeks, the legal expert
said.
In December, investigative judges summoned Saddam's
cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as
Chemical Ali for his role in poison gas attacks on
Kurds, and former Defense Minister Gen. Sultan
Hashim Ahmad to appear at closed-door preliminary
hearings.
The American soldier was killed Wednesday in an
ambush near Balad, a major U.S. base about 50 miles
north of Baghdad. Another U.S. soldier died Tuesday
of a gunshot wound at the Balad base. A third was
killed Sunday while on patrol in Mosul. More than
1,450 members of the U.S. military have died since
the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003.
Police said they had no leads in the slaying of
Abdul Hussein Khazal al-Basri, the correspondent for
Al-Hurra TV station, and his young son. Al-Basri was
also an official of the Islamic Dawa party, editor
of a newspaper in Basra and head of the press office
of the Basra City Council.
It was unclear if his affiliation with Al-Hurra was
the motive for the slaying. The station, launched a
year ago, was tailored for Arab audiences to compete
with regional stations like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.
President Bush said it was created to ``cut through
the hateful propaganda'' broadcast in the Arab
world.
In Rome, the newspaper that employs an Italian
journalist held hostage in Iraq said Wednesday it
has indications she is alive and that intelligence
officials have established indirect contact with her
kidnappers.
Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for communist daily Il
Manifesto, was abducted by gunmen Friday outside
Baghdad University. Conflicting claims have appeared
on Islamic militant Web sites: One said she had been
killed, while another said she would be released
soon.
Il Manifesto said an unspecified contact person saw
Sgrena on Monday and Tuesday, reporting that she was
well. The paper said the person could be used as a
mediator in future communications with Sgrena's
kidnappers.
The contact is the result of work by Italy's
government and intelligence services, the newspaper
said.
www.nytimes.com
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