BAGHDAD, 13 October 2006 — Gunmen killed nine staff at a television studio and bomb attacks rocked Baghdad yesterday as Pentagon officials said plans had been laid to allow US forces to stay in Iraq until 2010 if needed.

This latest sign that the Iraqi crisis is far from over came as a gang stormed the offices of Al-Shaabiya TV and slaughtered staff, including the general manager Abdul-Rahim Al-Nasrawi, a minor Shiite politician.

“We came in this morning and we saw the massacre. All were killed. We think gunmen broke into the house and killed them,” said a journalist from the Al-Shaabiya private satellite network, who asked not to be identified.

Aside from the manager, Abdul-Rahim Al-Nasrawi, eight more staff including an editor, a news reader and several clerks and security guards were killed in the attack on Al-Shaabiya’s station in a converted house in east Baghdad.

The Iraqi government condemned the attack. “The government condemns this act which aimed to muzzle the media,” spokesman Ali Dabagh told a new conference, vowing that authorities would take greater measures to protect the safety of journalists.

Nasrawi, a Shiite, was the leader of the Justice and Democratic Progress Party, a small and little-known movement, which stood in last year’s election but without success. However his station describes itself as non-partisan.

The main plank of the party’s platform was a demand that a timetable be set for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

Al-Shaabiya is currently broadcasting only music and advertisements during a test period and was due to go on air with a full menu of programming in 10 days at the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

A coordinated pair of bomb attacks killed at least five people and injured 10 more in a busy square in central Baghdad, security sources said. The blasts rattled windows a kilometer away and a plume of dust and smoke rose from the city skyline from Tayaran Square.

One police officer was killed and three wounded in the attack, security officials said, suggesting that the blasts had targeted security forces working for Iraq’s US-backed government.

The attackers first triggered a car bomb then detonated a roadside booby trap in the immediate aftermath of the first blast, in a bid to maximize casualties, security officials said. Three more people, including another policeman, died when a booby-trapped motorcycle exploded as officers examined it. Ten bystanders and five police were injured, a security official said.

Meanwhile, police continued to collect the bodies of murder victims slain in Baghdad’s sectarian dirty war between rival Sunni and Shiite death squads.

A US military spokeswoman said that 16 corpses had been found so far yesterday. The military also announced the death of another US soldier, bringing the number killed since the start of the month to 41 and since the US-led invasion of March 2003 to 2,750, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.

The US military has 142,000 soldiers deployed in Iraq, supporting the coalition government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and battling the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias pushing the country toward civil war.

In Washington, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker confirmed that contingency plans were being drawn up to have enough troops ready to maintain current force levels in Iraq until 2010. Schoomaker said the Army had scheduled troop rotations “at exactly what we have today” through the next four years, but said the actual number deployed will depend on conditions on the ground.

Meanwhile, police said the family of a 29-year-old Kurdish radio reporter who was abducted a week ago had identified his body in the Baghdad morgue. Azad Mohammed Hussein was kidnapped in northeastern Baghdad by unidentified gunmen while on his way to Dar Al-Salam radio headquarters in the capital’s Shaab neighborhood. His body was turned into the morgue Tuesday and identified by his family on Wednesday, police Capt. Ali Al-Obaidi said.

Another four people were killed and eight wounded when a suicide bomber on a motorcycle ran into a police patrol, police Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said. Two policemen were among the dead in the attack in eastern Baghdad. Elsewhere in the city, a synchronized bomb attack killed five and wounded 11 others, police Lt. Bilal Ali Majid said.