By MATT MOORE, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen posing as police at a makeshift checkpoint south of Baghdad killed two American civilians and their Iraqi translator — all employees of the U.S.-led coalition, U.S. officials said Wednesday.
In the northern town of Kirkuk, gunmen wounded three American soldiers near a stadium, the U.S. military said Wednesday.
The gunmen escaped after Monday's attack on soldiers from the Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division, Army spokesman Maj. Neal O'Brien said. The wounded were airlifted to Baghdad for treatment, he said at the American base in the central city of Tikrit.
In another southern area, four Iraqi policemen died in a shootout with a local militia.
The deaths at the checkpoint came when the gunmen stopped the car Tuesday night outside Hillah, 35 miles south of Baghdad, Polish Col. Robert Strzelecki said. The attackers shot the passengers and then took the vehicle, he said.
Polish troops later intercepted the car, arrested five Iraqis in it and found the bodies inside, said Strzelecki, speaking from the Camp Babylon headquarters of the Polish-led multinational force in Iraq. In Baghdad, a coalition spokesman confirmed the deaths.
Authorities did not immediately release the victims' identities. The Polish News Agency reported that one of those killed worked for the coalition press office.
Checkpoints manned by Iraqis or coalition forces are common on Iraq's main roads, and this appeared to be the first time gunmen have posed as police at a roadblock.
Further south, Iraqi police tried Tuesday night to enter a building where a Shiite militia was holding two civilians in the city of Nasiriyah, a coalition spokesman said. In a shootout, four Iraqi policemen were killed and two wounded.
The standoff finally ended when Italian security forces stormed the building, rescued the civilians and arrested eight militia members, the spokesman said. One Italian Carabinieri officer was slightly injured.
The militia, known as Citizens' Security Group, acts as a security force for a number of Shiite political parties. Such militias, which in some towns try to enforce a brand of Islamic law, often have tense relations with the U.S.-trained Iraqi police force.
In the western town of Qaim, near the Syrian border, gunmen killed two police officers and critically wounded a third Wednesday while the police were having lunch in a restaurant, police said.
Meanwhile, Abul Abbas, the Palestinian mastermind of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro passenger ship that left a wheelchair-bound American tourist dead, died of natural causes while in American custody in Baghdad, U.S. officials in Iraq said Wednesday.
Abbas, who died Monday, was captured by U.S. forces in April, nearly two decades after being convicted in absentia by an Italian court and sentenced to life in prison for the hijacking.
A statement from the U.S.-led coalition did not elaborate on the cause of death. There was an attempt to revive the 56-year-old Abbas, it said.
Abbas' small Palestine Liberation Front commandeered the Italian cruise ship, demanded the release of 50 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and threw an elderly Jewish American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, overboard after shooting him.
Meanwhile, Iraqi police arrested a prominent member in the northern Iraq-based militant group Ansar al-Islam, an Iraqi Kurd known as Ayoub al-Afghani, in Baghdad late Tuesday and handed him over to coalition forces, a Kurdish security official in Kirkuk said.
Also, the former head of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party in the town of Tarmiya, northwest of Baghdad, surrendered to U.S. troops Tuesday, O'Brien said. He did not comment on whether the official, Waleed al-Ayeesh, was suspected of involvement in anti-U.S. violence.
In Baqouba, northwest of Baghdad, a bomb went off near the offices of Iraq's largest Shiite party, wounding two people, said party spokesman Haithem al-Husseini.
Al-Husseini, of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, blamed the attack on former Saddam loyalists and terrorists "trying to spread chaos in the country."
The Baqouba bombing came a day after Shiite leaders criticized Iraq's interim constitution, clouding national unity ahead of the planned June 30 turnover of power by the coalition to Iraq.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the most influential cleric to Iraq's Shiite majority, initiated the latest episode of political wrangling. His objections to the interim charter prompted his supporters on the 25-seat Governing Council to refuse to sign the document Friday.
Citing a pressing need to safeguard national unity and push forward the political process, al-Sistani's supporters signed the constitution Monday, but made clear their reservations about parts of the document and their wish to change them.
On Tuesday, another grand ayatollah, Mohammed Taqi al-Modaresi, warned of civil war or dismemberment of Iraq because of the charter's adoption of a federal government system. SCIRI's leader, Governing Council member Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, said the document encroached on the powers of a future parliament.