Iraqi president sets date for first parliament sitting

Bombings and shootings yesterday killed at least 17 people around Iraq, while President Jalal Talabani issued a decree ordering the new parliament to hold its first session on March 19.

A suicide truck bomb ripped through a line of vehicles waiting at a checkpoint yesterday in Fallujah, killing seven civilians. Elsewhere authorities in the capital discovered the bodies of six men who were blindfolded, handcuffed and shot in the back of the head, police said.

Car bombs killed three in Samarra, including the imam at a Sunni mosque. Samarra was the scene of an attack on a Shi'ite shrine last month which ignited two weeks of violence.

A policeman in Tikrit died disarming a roadside bomb.

The violence came as Talabani's chief of staff Kamran al-Karadaghi said the president had ordered parliament to meet on March 19.

But there still was no resolution of the bitter dispute over a new term for Shi'ite Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, prompting Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish region of Iraq, to say the country was in political "crisis".

The developments came a day after the US said it planned to start moving thousands of detainees out of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison to a lock-up near the Baghdad airport within three months.

Abu Ghraib houses 4,537 of the 14,589 detainees held by the US military in Iraq.