Al-Qaida ‘planned to start Iraqi civil war’

A UN team assessing the feasibility of early elections in Iraq met with local politicians yesterday, amid reports that a suspected al-Qaida operative proposed provoking sectarian conflict between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims to disrupt the scheduled power transfer to Iraqis.

The US military, meanwhile, placed new bounties on the heads of suspected key insurgents, as two US soldiers were killed and six wounded in an explosion as they tried to dispose of weaponry in northern Iraq yesterday.

The nine-member election UN mission met with the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Jalal Talabani.