Increased attacks by insurgents over the past two days have killed at least 44 Iraqis, including 12 labourers – five of them brothers – who were gunned down at a construction site.

A suicide car bomber killed two Iraqis and wounded five today in an attack on a police patrol in an area of Baghdad where insurgents had kidnapped and murdered a defence lawyer in Saddam Hussein’s trial last week, police said.

The defence team in the trial of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has demanded that the case be delayed or moved out of Iraq, following the kidnapping and murder of one of its lawyers.

A DEFENCE lawyer in Saddam Hussein’s mass murder trial has been found dead, his body dumped near a Baghdad mosque with two gunshots to the head.

The body of a defence lawyer in Saddam Hussein’s mass murder trial was found dumped in the street with two bullet wounds in the head hours after gunmen dragged him from his office, terrorising the defence team, who today demanded the trial be further postponed or even moved out of Iraq.

A defence lawyer in Saddam Hussein’s mass murder trial who was kidnapped has been found dead, his body dumped near a Baghdad mosque, police and a top lawyers’ union official said today.

Iraqi delegates in business suits and clerics’ robes gathered today in Baghdad behind a wall of US tanks to work on forming a government to replace Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi, in his first public appearance in Baghdad, said today he expected an Iraqi interim authority to take over most government functions from the US military in ”a matter of weeks rather than months”.

IRAQ took its first tentative steps toward democracy yesterday and they began with a boycott and demonstrations.

The kings of Bahrain and Jordan today urged the US and British forces in Iraq to swiftly hand over the government of the country to the Iraqi people.

Free Iraqis tonight drew up a 13-point plan to rebuild their country from the rubble of war and decades of totalitarian rule.

The job of rebuilding Iraq from its war-torn ruins begins today with the first of a series of meetings to shape an interim authority and a future government.

AN interim authority could be up and running in Iraq within weeks, senior US officials said yesterday.

The pope has written a new book of poetry, a three-part meditation on nature, life and death – including his own – that makes clear he has no plans to step down.