BAGHDAD, 20 December 2003 — US administrator Paul Bremer escaped a rebel ambush on his convoy two weeks ago, authorities said yesterday. An explosion, meanwhile, struck the office of a major Shiite party, killing an Iraqi woman.
Also yesterday, a roadside bomb exploded near a US military truck outside Baghdad, wounding two US soldiers, the military said.
Nobody was injured in the attack on Bremer’s convoy on Dec. 6, the same day as a visit by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a spokesman said.
Bremer was riding in an armored car near the Baghdad airport when a roadside bomb exploded and guerrillas attacked with small arms fire, but his convoy sped away, said Dan Senor, a spokesman for the US-led coalition.
“As you can see, it didn’t succeed,” Bremer told reporters yesterday in Basra.
The attack was not believed to have been a planned assassination attempt on Bremer but merely another in a series of strikes against US convoys on that heavily traveled road near the airport.
Bremer has not curtailed his schedule of touring Iraq since then, and he traveled to the southern city of Basra yesterday, Senor said.
Yesterday’s predawn attack on the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution Party office, which also wounded five others, came a day after Shiites buried a senior party politician assassinated Wednesday as he left his home in Baghdad.
Party officials blamed both attacks on loyalists of Saddam Hussein, who was captured by US forces on Saturday.
Rahim Jabar, who lives in the building in western Baghdad, said his sister was killed and five other residents were wounded in the explosion, which brought down half of a one-story residential building that also housed a party branch office.
Supreme Council members rushed to the scene.
The blast that wounded the two American soldiers was caused by a homemade bomb, said Capt. Tammy Galloway of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
The tanker truck blew up about 7:50 a.m., near Abu Ghraib, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) west of Baghdad, sending flames and clouds of smoke rising from the wreckage.
In New York, a member of Iraq’s Governing Council yesterday welcomed UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s call to discuss the United Nations’ role in Iraq, saying its legal expertise would help the transition to Iraqi sovereignty.
Annan said Thursday he wants the key players in Iraq, including the US-appointed council and the coalition, to meet Jan. 15 and decide exactly what role they want the United Nations to play as the country moves from US occupation toward self-government.
Iraq’s justice minister said yesterday that the appointment of international judges to a tribunal that will try Saddam Hussein is inappropriate because it would undermine Iraqi sovereignty, expected by July 1.
Also, a radical Shiite cleric said an independent religious tribunal should be set up to try Saddam, and that the court should include religious leaders from Kuwait and Iran, which were both invaded by the former dictator.
— Additional input from agencies
