Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News Staff

BAGHDAD, 28 January 2004 — Roadside bombings and an ambush left seven people, three of them American soldiers, dead in Iraq yesterday as the United Nations sent a team to assess prospects for early elections.

Two CNN employees were those killed in the ambush outside Baghdad, the international television news organization said. It said a driver and a translator/producer were shot dead as they were returning to Baghdad from the south in a two-car convoy. A cameraman in the other car was wounded.

In the capital, US forces discovered a car bomb in a parking lot near the offices of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.

The car rigged with explosives was found at Gate 2, a high-security checkpoint manned by US troops, the US command said. Troops sealed off the area as bomb disposal experts tried to defuse it.

Elsewhere, US soldiers killed three members of a suspected guerrilla cell linked to Saddam Hussein’s former Baathist regime, the military said.

In a city south of Baghdad, insurgents fired at an Iraqi police post in front of the Polish military base late Monday, triggering a gunfight that left one policeman dead.

Iraqi witnesses said a roadside bomb exploded next to a military convoy in Khaldiyah in the tense region west of the capital. As reinforcements rushed to the scene, another bomb went off, hitting a second military vehicle.

Three American soldiers were killed and one injured in the attack, the US military said. Hospital staff said two Iraqis were killed, one of them shot in the stomach as he stood in his office nearby.

In Paris, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the United Nations would send a team to Iraq to determine whether elections should be held once the US-led coalition authority can guarantee the mission’s safety.

Annan said in a statement that he believed the world body can play “a constructive role” in helping to break an impasse over the selection of a future interim Iraqi government. The election issue is at the heart of the dispute between the coalition administration and Iraq’s majority Shiites who are opposed to a US plan for transfer of power that calls for setting up a provisional government through a caucus system. Full elections are not envisaged until 2005.

An influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Husseini Al-Sistani, says only direct, early elections will satisfy the aspirations of the Shiites, who suffered for decades under Saddam’s regime.

“The mission will ascertain the views of a broad spectrum of Iraqi society in the search for alternatives that might be developed to move forward to the formation of a provisional government,” Annan’s statement said.

— Additional input from agencies