Gunmen Slay 19 Workers in Iraq

Suspected Sunni Muslim insurgents killed at least 19 power plant employees and Shiite Muslim laborers during a rampage in a rural stretch northeast of Baghdad, officials said Friday.

A loose coalition of political leaders, meanwhile, pushed ahead with an attempt to derail the nomination of interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari to serve a full term as premier. Kurds, Sunnis and a secular bloc led by former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi are trying to persuade the leading Shiite Muslim bloc to withdraw Jafari’s name.

Calm prevailed throughout the country during the Muslim sabbath. Officials had imposed a ban on vehicles in Baghdad until 4 p.m.

Border police announced the arrest of a man wanted in connection with the bombing of the Abqaiq refinery in Saudi Arabia last week. Ali Abdulla Salih Harbi, of unspecified nationality, was detained with five other men in the desert near the Saudi border, said Saddoun Jabouri, a spokesman for the border police.

Authorities in the northern city of Kirkuk found the bodies of two police officers from the Sunni city of Tikrit, Capt. Abbas Mohammed said. The bodies of the officers, who had been abducted several days earlier, showed signs of torture. Two bodies were found near Iskandariya, part of a patchwork of impoverished Shiite and Sunni villages south of Baghdad.

In the most grisly incident, more than 50 gunmen attacked an electricity substation in Nahrawan, near the city of Baqubah, killing nine employees and injuring two guards, police said.

As U.S. and Iraqi troops arrived, the gunmen withdrew toward brick factories in the mixed Sunni-Shiite area between Baqubah and Baghdad, a frequent site of sectarian killings, and killed 10 Shiite workers.

On the political front, Jafari’s opponents need some lawmakers from his Shiite bloc, which has the most members in the 275-seat parliament, to defect in order to scuttle his nomination. He is widely viewed by Kurds and Sunnis as ineffective and sectarian.

Shiites have maintained a united front behind Jafari, who secured his 130-member coalition’s nomination by a one-vote margin.

But in recent days, cracks have begun to emerge in the United Iraqi Alliance, which has the backing of Iraq’s top Shiite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

At Friday prayers in Najaf, Ayatollah Mohammed Yaqoubi, spiritual leader of one of the parties in the Shiite coalition, criticized Jafari as well as other politicians.

“The prime minister leaves the country burning and goes to Turkey, while national leaders usually break their trips and go back home when an incident takes place in their country,” he told worshipers, referring to a trip taken during the tumult that followed the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra. “As for the leaders of the political blocs, they have been meeting not to lift obstacles and solve complications, but only to blame others.”

Some Shiite lawmakers have privately expressed concern that the issue could harm the alliance’s strategic partnership with the Kurds.

“To be committed to a Jafari nomination will lead to a bottomless pit,” said one official with the alliance, who requested anonymity. “The Kurds are not ready to sacrifice the friendship of the Americans and Europe for the sake of Ibrahim Jafari.”

The Shiite coalition’s seven-member leadership committee held an emergency meeting Thursday to discuss a letter submitted earlier in the day by Kurds and Sunnis calling for Jafari’s dismissal.

“The entire alliance is very firm on that and will not give up on Jafari,” said Sami Askari, a member of the Shiite coalition.

He downplayed the controversy as a “personal matter” between Jafari and President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd. “We are continuously meeting with the Kurds and Sunnis,” he said. “Our meetings are productive, and we will surpass this obstacle.”

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Times staff writers Caesar Ahmed and Raheem Salman in Baghdad, special correspondents Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf and Ali Windawi in Kirkuk and a special correspondent in Baqubah contributed to this report.