Suspect in Envoy’s Slaying Caught

The U.S. military said Thursday that it had captured a key suspect in the kidnapping and slaying of Egypt’s top envoy to Iraq.

About 30 suspected members of Al Qaeda have been arrested in the last week, including the suspect in this month’s killing of Egyptian Ihab Sherif and attacks on other senior diplomats from Bahrain and Pakistan, the U.S. command said.

Khamis Abdul Fahdawi, known as Abu Seba, was captured Saturday after operations in the Ramadi area west of Baghdad, it said.

Also on Thursday, new details emerged about a suicide attack that morning near the capital’s Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy and major Iraqi government offices are located.

Iraqi and U.S. forces captured one suicide bomber before he could detonate his explosives belt, U.S. officials said.

The thwarted attack was intended to be part of coordinated assaults by a suicide car bomber and two pedestrians strapped with explosives.

The attackers apparently planned to detonate the car bomb first. Then the two pedestrians were to blow themselves up in the midst of troops, police and rescuers rushing to the scene, U.S. officials said.

The car bomb exploded as planned. But one pedestrian bomber was killed when he was shot by an Iraqi policeman, setting off his explosives, a U.S. statement said.

The second pedestrian bomber was wounded by shrapnel from the blast before he could detonate his vest and was in critical condition at a U.S. military hospital in the Green Zone, the statement said.

Five policemen and four civilians were wounded, officials at Yarmouk Hospital said.

There was no word on the identity of the failed bomber.

In other violence late Thursday, gunmen killed an Iraqi soldier in Baghdad and another outside the Taji military base about 10 miles north of the capital, police said.

Elsewhere, police said gunmen killed five Iraqi employees of an American base in Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, as they were driving outside the base.

At least nine policemen were killed in separate attacks nationwide.