Shrine bombing: Four arrested

Iraqi police have arrested four men – including two Saudis – in connection with the bombing of Iraq’s most holy Shi-ite Muslim shrine.

All four have connections to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terror network, a senior police official said today.

The official, who said the death toll in the Friday bombing had risen to 107, said the four arrested men – two Iraqis and two Saudis – were caught shortly after the car bombing that also killed one of the most important Shi-ite clerics in Iraq.

The dead cleric, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, had been co-operating with the American occupation force.

The police official, who led the initial investigation and interrogation of the captives, said the prisoners told of other plots to kill political and religious leaders and to damage vital installations such as electricity generation plants, water supplies and oil pipelines.

The official, who refused to be named, said the bomb at the Imam Ali shrine - the burial place of the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad – was made from the same type of materials used in the August 19 bombing at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, in which at least 23 people died, and the Jordanian Embassy attack on August 7. Nineteen people died in that vehicle bombing.

The FBI said the UN bomb was constructed from ordnance left over from the regime of Saddam Hussein, with much of it produced in the former Soviet Union. In the truck bomb used against the world body, there were many explosives wired together, including a 500-pound Soviet-era bomb, the FBI said.

The police official said the men arrested after the attack claimed the recent bombings were designed to “keep Iraq in a state of chaos so that police and American forces are unable to focus attention” on the country’s porous borders, across which suspected foreign fighters are said to be infiltrating.

The four men arrived in Najaf three days before the Friday bombing and were staying with a friend, who did not know their intentions, the official said.

A shadowy group that takes its name from the alias of Mohammed Atef, bin Laden’s top deputy who was killed in a US airstrike in Afghanistan in November 2001, claimed responsibility for the UN bombing.

American officials believe militants from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran are infiltrating Iraq to attack Western interests. President Bush said earlier this month that more foreign “al Qaida-type fighters” have moved in.

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef dismissed as ”baseless” allegations that Saudis infiltrated to Iraq to join the fight against coalition forces.

“These allegations are totally baseless and we know nothing about any Saudi individual entering Iraq through our borders,” he was quoted as saying in an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat published today.

Meanwhile today, thousands of angry mourners called for vengeance as they gathered outside the Imam Ali shrine.

“Our leader al-Hakim is gone. We want the blood of the killers of al-Hakim,” a crowd of 4,000 men beating their chests chanted in unison in Najaf, 110 miles southwest of Baghdad.