BAGHDAD, Nov. 24 -- An American diplomat was killed Wednesday in an attack near the heavily fortified sector of central Baghdad known as the Green Zone, U.S. officials said.
Jim Mollen, 48, of Binghamton, N.Y., was the U.S. Embassy's senior consultant to the Iraqi ministers of education and higher education. He was shot to death while traveling in a car within a mile of the Green Zone, according to his mother, Anne Mollen.
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in a statement that he was "profoundly saddened" by Mollen's killing. "Jim dedicated his life to a noble cause: improving the quality of education for thousands of Iraqis," Powell said.
Mollen was the second U.S. diplomat known to have been killed in Baghdad since Iraq's interim government assumed political power on June 28. Edward J. Seitz, an assistant regional security officer for the U.S. Embassy, was killed in an attack on a U.S. military base near Baghdad's airport on Oct. 24.
Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded Wednesday on the road to the airport, killing three people, and the U.S. military said it found five more bodies in the northern city of Mosul.
The grisly discovery in Iraq's third-largest city brought to 20 the number of corpses found there in the past week. Of those, at least 10 were Iraqi soldiers, nine of them killed execution-style. Four others were decapitated and have not been identified.
In Baghdad, the car bomb was packed in a red Volkswagen. It exploded in the Yarmuk neighborhood on an overpass behind a convoy of sport-utility vehicles, the kind that often carry diplomats, U.S. officials or contractors. The convoy was apparently unscathed, but the blast hurled a car off the bridge, killing a woman and two children inside, said Ahmed Gatia, an Iraqi policeman at the scene.
Baghdad was comparatively calm Wednesday after street battles in a Sunni Muslim neighborhood erupted this past weekend between U.S. forces and insurgents armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. But many in Baghdad have said they fear the violence will only mount as the country approaches parliamentary elections scheduled for Jan. 30. Powerful groups among Iraq's Sunni minority have called for an election boycott, and the influential Iraqi Islamic Party called for a six-month delay in the ballot.
The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has insisted that U.S. troops, with the help of Iraqi security forces, will establish control over restive, Sunni-dominated regions in central Iraq by election day, a claim met by skepticism in Baghdad.
"As the election gets closer, the situation will get worse," said Osama Hussein, 25, a jeweler in the Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Kadhimiya, a relatively tranquil oasis of Baghdad where crowds still walk the streets past sunset. "God willing, things will get better after the election. Right now, we only feel safe here."
South of Baghdad in Babil province, Iraqi police captured "a suspected insurgent leader," according to U.S. military spokesmen. Few details were available about the capture, which the U.S. military said occurred at the agricultural bank in the town of Mahmudiyah.
The police raid was part of a larger operation that began Tuesday in which U.S., British and Iraqi forces hunted insurgents in the northern part of the province. U.S. troops there saw little action Wednesday.
"It was a relatively quiet day," said Capt. David Nevers, spokesman for the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is leading the effort. "We expect more in the days to come."
The operation is targeting a number of houses and other locations where insurgents are thought to be hiding. But unlike the recent major assaults on Fallujah and Samarra, which involved large clusters of forces maneuvering through urban neighborhoods in house-to-house searches, this push is likely to proceed in starts and stops, officers said.
