Iraqi Governor Found Dead After Clash

Mahalawi, son of a top sheik of Anbar's leading Albu Mahal tribe, had been elected to his post by a local council on May 3. The foreign Arabs who kidnapped him on May 10 said they would release him only when U.S. Marines halted an offensive in Anbar -- the first of two in May.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry reported May 15 that Mahalawi had been freed by his captors, who were said to have left him behind in a village near Qaim. But a U.S. military official said the report was erroneous and that the governor was never out of the kidnappers' custody. There might have been some confusion because Mahalawi was being moved from place to place, the official said.

Boylan said Sunday's clash began when a U.S. Army force on an unrelated mission near Rawah came under fire from a rocket-propelled grenade and small arms.

Soldiers fired back, sending bullets and at least one antitank round into the house, Boylan said. Troops also saw explosions inside the house during the battle, he said.

Afterward, Americans found the dead and injured foreign Arabs and Mahalawi's body, Boylan said. A U.S. military statement said the troops also found bombmaking material.

"It was not a rescue attempt," Boylan said of the clash. "We had no way to know he was in that house."

U.S. forces made no mention of the governor's death until Tuesday, when Kubba, spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, announced it at a news conference.

After the killing, the governor's family had asked U.S. military officials not to intervene if tribe members attacked hideouts of Arab fighters they believed were somehow involved, said one relative, Omar Farhan.

Under the tribe's custom, deaths must be avenged before the victims can be buried, local officials said. An Iraqi army officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the bodies of four suspected foreign Arabs were found Tuesday afternoon near a burned car in Rawah.

Late Tuesday, U.S. Marines took up positions along the governor's funeral route and around homes of his family, apparently guarding the mourners, witnesses said. Marine spokesmen could not immediately be reached for comment on that point.

A statement that was circulated Tuesday in Anbar in the name of the militant group al Qaeda in Iraq, led by Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, threatened retaliation against "young and old" of the tribe as "collaborators with the occupier."

Elsewhere in Iraq, the U.S. military confirmed the deaths of four American service members and one Iraqi pilot in the first crash involving Iraq's newly reconstituted air force. The single-engine plane was in flames and on the ground when a witness spotted it about 80 miles northeast of Baghdad, but there was no word of how Monday's crash occurred, said Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, a military spokesman.