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Ahmed Chalabi escapes assassination attempt

An Iraqi politician and disgraced former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi said he escaped unharmed after an assassination attempt yesterday which left two of his bodyguards wounded.

"I was coming back from Najaf, where I had met with Grand Ayatollah Alial-Sistani the previous day, and when we reached Latifiya, a car started following us and opened fire on our convoy," said Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress.

"Two of my bodyguards were wounded, one of them seriously," said Chalabi,speaking ahead of the first meeting of Iraq's interim parliament in Baghdad.

Latifiya is a town south of Baghdad which commands access to the main road heading to the holy Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala on which drive-by shootings and kidnappings are frequent.

Chalabi, a leading figure of the exiled opposition to Saddam Hussein before the US-led invasion, fell out of favor with his US protectors over suspicion of leaking intelligence to Iran. After the invasion, the US-led coalition appointed him at the head of a committee tasked with expelling thousands of former members of Saddam's Baath party from the army and administration.

Also in Baghdad, five explosions rocked an area near the venue for the opening of Iraq's interim national assembly yesterday and one Iraqi civilian was hurt, officials and witnesses said. A US military spokesman said the blasts went off outside the fortified Green Zone compound, where members of the 100-seat assembly had gathered ahead of the inaugural session of the body, which was chosen last month.

The cause of the explosions, which startled the assembly members, was unclear, the spokesman said, but insurgents regularly fire mortars at the zone, which also houses the interim government and the US embassy.

"There were three to five explosions. All the explosions happened outside the International Zone," the spokesman said.

Two US Apache helicopter gunships were seen hovering over the sprawling compound in central Baghdad. Iraq's Interior Ministry said it had no details on the blasts.

When 1,300 delegates from across Iraq met to select the assembly last month, insurgents fired mortars at the meeting venue, killing two civilians nearby.

Meanwhile in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, gunmen shot and killed three women who worked at a US base police said yesterday.

The attack occurred late Tuesday as the women were returning home from the base in Mosul, police said It was not immediately known what jobs they held there.
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