2 Coalition Employees, Interpreter Slain in Iraq

Two U.S. citizens working for the Coalition Provisional Authority were gunned down along with their Iraqi interpreter in a tense area south of Baghdad, the first American civilians working for the U.S.-led administration to be killed in Iraq, a coalition official said Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Kurdish officials in Iraq said they had captured Ayoub Afghani, reputed to be the chief bomb maker for the terrorist group Ansar al Islam. The capture of Afghani could yield important information about recent bombings, particularly in Kurdistan, Kurdish officials said.

Few details were available about the deaths of the Americans and the Iraqi interpreter late Tuesday near Hillah, about 50 miles south of Baghdad.

“It’s a great tragedy, and our hearts go out to the relatives of those killed,” L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, told Fox Television. His spokesman, Dan Senor, called the attack “a targeted act of terrorism” and said Bremer had requested that an FBI team be deployed to lead the investigation.

Senor declined to provide details of the incident and cautioned against an account provided by Polish authorities who lead the multinational team patrolling southern Iraq. The Poles reported that the U.S. officials had been shot execution-style at a checkpoint by attackers disguised as Iraqi police officers.

“The facts are still coming out, and we’re going to wait on the investigation,” Senor said.

Assassins linked to the anti-U.S. insurgency are known to watch the roads and target Westerners and Iraqis assisting them, often seeking out the kind of four-wheel-drive vehicles favored by Westerners. Temporary checkpoints are also appearing with increasing frequency. They are set up by uniformed and non-uniformed armed men -- including local militias, Iraqi police and the U.S. military -- and it is difficult to tell whether they are legitimate.

The names of the two civilian employees of the Defense Department were being withheld pending notification of relatives, Senor said.

Abbas Abdul Hussein, an Iraqi journalist who went to the scene of the shooting, said the body of the Iraqi translator was completely disfigured by bullet wounds.

They were the first American coalition employees killed in the Iraq conflict, Senor said. The Coalition Provisional Authority has 2,500 to 3,000 civilian employees.

A U.S. military officer attached to the coalition, Lt. Col. Charles Buehringv, was killed last fall in a rocket attack on the Rashid Hotel, where many coalition employees were living then.

About a dozen civilians working for contractors in Iraq have been killed in roadside attacks, although there is no official tally. However, the vast majority of American casualties in Iraq have been military personnel; more than 500 have died.

Civilian employees are known to be targets of insurgents and generally do not travel outside U.S.-guarded secure zones or bases without armed escorts.

If confirmed, the capture of Afghani, so named because he fought with Afghan forces against the Soviets in the 1980s, would be significant because the organization is believed to be reconstituting itself after attacks by U.S. and Kurdish forces on its main camp in Kurdistan last spring. Many of its fighters were killed. An estimated 300 others fled over the mountains to Iran.

“I can confirm he has been arrested,” Sarko Mahmoud, an official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan’s foreign relations office, said of Afghani. “It is very important that such a person, who ... is responsible for some of the recent bombings in Kurdistan and elsewhere in the country, be arrested.”

However, U.S. military sources said they could not confirm the arrest.

Kurdish officials believe that Afghani’s expertise is in making car bombs and suicide vests, and that one of his car bombs exploded on March 22, 2003, as U.S. planes and cruise missiles were striking Ansar al Islam positions in northern Iraq. The bomb went off at a checkpoint in Girdy Gou while refugees were fleeing the region. Five people were killed.

Kurdish intelligence said after the war that authorities had found several cars loaded with explosives that Ansar al Islam had abandoned as its members fled the U.S. and Kurdish attack. Afghani also was believed to be recruiting young would-be suicide bombers and perfecting suicide bomb vests made out of yellow life preservers, at least one of which was seen by a Times journalist at an abandoned Ansar stronghold.

In the southern city of Nasiriya, Iraqi police tried Tuesday night to enter a building where a Shiite Muslim militia was holding two civilians. Such militias sometimes help local police enforce the law but sometimes try to impose Islamic law.

The standoff ended when Italian security forces stormed the building, rescued the civilians and arrested eight militia members. Italian soldiers are responsible for Nasiriya and the surrounding area.

In a separate incident near the Syrian border, reports said gunmen killed two police officers and critically wounded a third.

Times staff writers Patrick J. McDonnell and Salar Jaff in Baghdad and Jeffrey Fleishman in Berlin contributed to this report.