Top Police Official Is Abducted In Baghdad

Jafari Said to Be Named Prime Minister Thursday

An Iraqi carries his injured son to a hospital after a car bomb exploded in western Baghdad as an Iraqi National Guard convoy was passing. One other civilian was reported dead and another was injured. (Atef Hassan -- Reuters)

BAGHDAD, April 6 -- A senior Iraqi police official was kidnapped on a Baghdad street early Tuesday and at least 11 other Iraqis, including a cleric, a translator and a councilman, were killed or wounded in continuing violence around the country. U.S. military officials reported the deaths of four U.S. service members.

Members of the newly elected National Assembly, meanwhile, were officially notified to reconvene Wednesday to elect a president -- widely expected to be Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader -- and two vice presidents.

Iraqi political party officials said that in addition to Talabani, they had agreed to name Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite Muslim and the current interim finance minister, as one of the vice presidents. The other post was expected to go to Ghazi Yawar, a Sunni Muslim who is now Iraq's interim president, the officials said.

Two senior Iraqi political officials said early Wednesday that the new appointees will move quickly to choose Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite politician, as Iraq's new prime minister, the most powerful political post in the new government. Ali Debbagh, a senior official with the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, and Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurdish politician and interim foreign minister, said an agreement had been reached to name Jafari on Thursday, breaking a weeks-long political impasse.

Brig. Gen. Jalal Mohamed Saleh, the head of an armored brigade at the Interior Ministry, became the latest Iraqi official captured by insurgents. Saleh was pulled from his car in Baghdad's western district of Mansour, a Defense Ministry spokesman said.

Also Tuesday, around 9:30 a.m., a U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol in southern Baghdad, U.S. officials said. Four other soldiers were wounded in the incident.

On Monday, a U.S. Marine was killed by an explosion during combat in Anbar province, a hotbed of the insurgency west of Baghdad, the U.S. military reported Tuesday. And in Diyala province, two U.S. soldiers, an Iraqi soldier and about 17 insurgents were killed Monday during an hours-long skirmish at a remote location about 30 miles east of Baghdad, a U.S. military spokesman said.

That firefight began after an Iraqi army unit searching for weapons caches came under fire from small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. The Iraqis were given support by U.S. Army helicopters from the 42nd Aviation Brigade and U.S. Air Force warplanes, as well as from a mechanized quick-reaction force from Task Force Liberty's 278th Regimental Combat Team, according to Maj. Richard L. Goldenberg, spokesman for the 42nd Infantry Division.

"As the Iraqi army unit advanced, the insurgents fell back to prepared positions" where they had stored ammunition, Goldenberg wrote in an e-mail. "By evening, additional Iraqi army forces arrived to assist the attacking unit." He said combat "continued sporadically through the night as the terrorists attempted to break contact and escape from the scene."

Goldenberg said the protracted encounter with the guerrillas, who numbered two to three dozen, marked "the second instance in less than three weeks that terrorists and insurgents have been caught gathering in a remote location."

On March 22, U.S.-supported Iraqi police commandos clashed with dozens of insurgents in what Iraqi officials described as a remote training camp near Tharthar Lake.

Though the two incidents "do not yet indicate a trend," Goldenberg said, they "are strong indicators" that the insurgents "are finding less favor in Iraqi cities and populated areas."

Meanwhile, a man driving his daughter to her job as a translator at the city hall in Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, was killed by gunmen, a hospital official said. His daughter, 26, was seriously wounded, the official added.

Elsewhere, gunmen killed Salim Hilal, a member of the Babil provincial council, as he headed to work in Hilla, officials told the Associated Press. Three bodyguards were injured. And a Sunni Muslim cleric, Hilal Karim, was killed in a drive-by shooting as he entered his mosque in New Baghdad, a neighborhood in the capital, police Col. Ahmed Aboud told the news agency.

In the northern city of Mosul, insurgents killed Kurdistan Democratic Party official Salim Ibrahim, according to a party official.

Also in Mosul, a freelance cameraman for CBS News was accidentally shot in the hip as he stood near a suspected insurgent killed by U.S. soldiers. The journalist was expected to recover, and CBS and the military said the camera was mistaken for a weapon, the Associated Press reported.

Special correspondents Bassam Sebti and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad, Saad Sarhan in Najaf and Hassan Shammari in Baqubah contributed to this report.