Shiites fail to agree PM nominee

Leaders of the Shiite political alliance that won Iraq’s election failed to agree on a single nominee for prime minister today.

The two candidates insisted on a vote by the alliance’s 140 MPs, officials said.

After meeting for hours with Shiite cleric and politician Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, members of the United Iraqi Alliance agreed to hold a secret ballot to choose between two former exiles, Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Ahmad Chalabi. The vote is expected on Friday.

Both candidates were expected to present their political agendas and priorities to alliance members before the vote.

The failure to reach a consensus revealed cracks within the coalition, which consists of 10 major parties backed by Shiite religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

But Hayder al-Mousawi, Chalabi’s spokesman, denied there was a serious problem.

“No way is there a division inside the alliance. Everybody agreed on adhering to whatever results the internal elections will reach,” he said.

Al-Jaafari, a 58-year-old moderate Shiite Muslim who fled into London exile during a brutal crackdown by Saddam Hussein in 1980, said he wants a constitution that will draw not only on Islam.

“Islam should be the official religion of the country, and one of the main sources for legislation, along with other sources that do not harm Muslim sensibilities,” said al-Jaafari, who currently serves as Iraq’s interim vice president and was living in London until Saddam’s regime was overthrown.

The former hospital doctor said he supports women’s rights, including the right to be the president or prime minister, as well as self-determination and individual freedoms for all Iraqis.

Al-Jaafari said that if he is confirmed as prime minister, he would first try to stymie the violence that has crippled the country’s recovery from decades of war and hardship.

Chalabi, 58, leads the Iraqi National Congress and had close ties to the Pentagon before falling out of favour last year after claims he passed intelligence information to Iran, where he lived as a youth.

A secular Shiite, his Iraqi National Congress is an umbrella for groups that included Iraqi exiles, Kurds and Shiites. Much of the intelligence his group supplied on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction programs failed to pan out.

The Kurdish parties have apparently agreed to support the alliance’s candidate for prime minister in return for the presidency.

Meanwhile north of Baghdad today, police found the bound, gagged bodies of eight Iraqis, mostly civilians who had worked at a US military base, in shallow graves. All were shot in the back of the head.

The eight had been missing since they were kidnapped three days ago by insurgents, said

Mohammed Latif, chief of the local police force in Dejali, 40 miles north of the capital. He said a piece of paper attached to each body said: “This is the punishment of the traitors and those who work for the American occupation.”