Top official's license plate used in Karbala ambush, informant says 'high officials' involved

One of many checkpoints that lead the way to Baghdad's heavily fortified 'Green Zone', where the license plate may have been stolen.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A license plate from a car registered to Iraq's minister of trade was found on an SUV used by the gunmen who killed five American soldiers in the city of Karbala on Saturday, an Iraqi police official said Monday.

Maj. Gen. Qais al-Maamuri, a police commander in Hilla, said the plate had been stolen from a BMW that belongs to Abdul Falah al-Sudani, a member of the Shiite Muslim Dawa Party. He said Sudani wasn't a suspect in the attack.

The link, however, deepened the mystery surrounding the Saturday attack as the second double-car bombing in Baghdad in seven days provided additional evidence that it will be difficult to quell the violence, even with the additional U.S. troops President Bush is sending to Iraq.

U.S. officials confirmed Monday that five Americans were killed in Saturday's attack, but they revealed no information about how the gunmen obtained a top Iraqi official's license plate, U.S. and Iraqi army uniforms and identification cards and vehicles like the ones used to carry U.S. officials.

Most Iraqi officials live in the American-protected Green Zone, where entry is strictly controlled. If the license plate were stolen from Sudani's car inside the Green Zone, that would suggest an inside job.

American soldiers frequently complain that sympathetic Iraqi police and soldiers tip off targets of raids in advance, but Iraqi officials marveled at the brazenness of Saturday's attack in Karbala, a city controlled by Shiites.

The attackers stormed the provincial headquarters just as a U.S. military civil affairs team was meeting with local leaders. Using familiar Chevrolet Suburbans and at least one Toyota Land Cruiser, they roared through checkpoints without stopping. Iraqi officials said they wore American and Iraqi military uniforms, brandished American and Iraqi IDs and carried American weapons.

The attack was so well executed that Karbala provincial officials at first accused the Americans of raiding the headquarters.

Details remained confused on Monday. Vehicles used in the attack were found abandoned on the side of the road near the farms of a pro-Saddam Sunni tribe, the Elbu Alwan. One was found parked in a driveway in the city of Hilla.

At least one man - the owner of the house where one of the vehicles was found - has been arrested.

Police said clues point to the Elbu Alwan tribe, but they couldn't say why the planners of such a sophisticated attack would abandon their vehicles near their own homes.

One man who was apprehended near Hilla after the attacks told police that "high officials" had aided in the attack, according to a police official who asked not to be named because he wasn't authorized to release details of the investigation.

Read the rest at the San Jose Mercury News

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