British troops conducted raids overnight in Basra and detained a dozen people suspected of links to a spate of deadly attacks against British forces, a British military spokesman said.
The raids came hours after British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah movement of supplying technology and explosives to Shiite Muslim militant groups operating in Iraq, although he said he had no proof.
Military spokesman Major Steven Melbourne said: "We had an operation last night in Basra and 12 people were arrested. The investigation is ongoing and we cannot give any details about the people who were detained."
"There have been a lot of attacks against multi-national forces in recent week and there were certain individuals that we needed to question and about whom we had good intelligence," he said.
Military commanders suspect that militant groups with links to Iraq's rebel Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have been aided by Shiite Iran in carrying out the attacks. Sources with Sadr's office in Basra said those detained overnight included several lieutenants in Basra's interior affairs department, which is part of the Interior Ministry.
"They are mostly Sadr people," one of the sources said.
He said some of the suspects were seized from the police building that British forces attacked late last month to free two undercover soldiers who had been detained by Iraqi police. The military spokesman said that the arrests had been conducted peacefully, with no shots fired, and that more details would be made available shortly.
offensive kills 29
A US offensive aimed at uprooting al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgents in western Iraq before next week's constitutional referendum killed 29 militants, including 20 who died when warplanes bombed an abandoned hotel they had commandeered, the military said.
The fighting occurred on Thursday during one of two offensives being conducted by thousands of US troops and hundreds of Iraqi soldiers in several Euphrates River towns that insurgents were virtually controlling after the withdrawal of most Iraqi police and soldiers.
Elsewhere, residents in Baghdad and other cities were receiving copies of Iraq's draft constitution, though some refused to take it and some shopkeepers balked at passing it out, fearing reprisals by militants determined to wreck the crucial Oct. 15 referendum.
"Some people are excited to take it. Others are refusing to touch it," Mohammed Ali, a shopkeeper in western Baghdad who handed out about 150, said.
A new online voting system aimed at boosting turnout among the Philippines’ millions of overseas workers ahead of Monday’s mid-term elections has been marked by confusion and fears of disenfranchisement. Thousands of overseas Filipino workers have already cast their ballots in the race dominated by a bitter feud between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and his impeached vice president, Sara Duterte. While official turnout figures are not yet publicly available, data from the Philippine Commission on Elections (COMELEC) showed that at least 134,000 of the 1.22 million registered overseas voters have signed up for the new online system, which opened on April 13. However,
ALLIES: Calling Putin his ‘old friend,’ Xi said Beijing stood alongside Russia ‘in the face of the international counter-current of unilateralism and hegemonic bullying’ Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday was in Moscow for a state visit ahead of the Kremlin’s grand Victory Day celebrations, as Ukraine accused Russia’s army of launching air strikes just hours into a supposed truce. More than 20 foreign leaders were in Russia to attend a vast military parade today marking 80 years since the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, taking place three years into Russia’s offensive in Ukraine. Putin ordered troops into Ukraine in February 2022 and has marshaled the memory of Soviet victory against Nazi Germany to justify his campaign and rally society behind the offensive,
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