British troops conducted raids overnight in Basra and detained a dozen people suspected of links to a spate of deadly attacks against British forces, a British military spokesman said.
The raids came hours after British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah movement of supplying technology and explosives to Shiite Muslim militant groups operating in Iraq, although he said he had no proof.
Military spokesman Major Steven Melbourne said: "We had an operation last night in Basra and 12 people were arrested. The investigation is ongoing and we cannot give any details about the people who were detained."
"There have been a lot of attacks against multi-national forces in recent week and there were certain individuals that we needed to question and about whom we had good intelligence," he said.
Military commanders suspect that militant groups with links to Iraq's rebel Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have been aided by Shiite Iran in carrying out the attacks. Sources with Sadr's office in Basra said those detained overnight included several lieutenants in Basra's interior affairs department, which is part of the Interior Ministry.
"They are mostly Sadr people," one of the sources said.
He said some of the suspects were seized from the police building that British forces attacked late last month to free two undercover soldiers who had been detained by Iraqi police. The military spokesman said that the arrests had been conducted peacefully, with no shots fired, and that more details would be made available shortly.
offensive kills 29
A US offensive aimed at uprooting al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgents in western Iraq before next week's constitutional referendum killed 29 militants, including 20 who died when warplanes bombed an abandoned hotel they had commandeered, the military said.
The fighting occurred on Thursday during one of two offensives being conducted by thousands of US troops and hundreds of Iraqi soldiers in several Euphrates River towns that insurgents were virtually controlling after the withdrawal of most Iraqi police and soldiers.
Elsewhere, residents in Baghdad and other cities were receiving copies of Iraq's draft constitution, though some refused to take it and some shopkeepers balked at passing it out, fearing reprisals by militants determined to wreck the crucial Oct. 15 referendum.
"Some people are excited to take it. Others are refusing to touch it," Mohammed Ali, a shopkeeper in western Baghdad who handed out about 150, said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
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