Iraqi leaders talk with UN team on sovereignty

"Official meetings with the United Nations team of experts have started this morning at the headquarters of Iraq's interim Governing Council," a council spokesman who did not wish to be identified told AFP.

"About seven or eight members of the Governing Council are participating in the meeting," he said.

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The UN team is made up technical experts due to give advice on holding elections, conducting a census and assembling a caretaker government set to rule when sovereignty returns to Iraqis on June 30.

The team, which started its visit Friday amid political wrangling over the country's interim constitution, will be joined later this week by a UN political delegation headed by special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.

Shia spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has been the most vocal critic of the interim constitution, threatening to boycott talks with the advisors unless the United Nations declares it non-binding.

Sistani has criticized the interim law for granting broad rights to the Kurdish and Sunni minorities.

But an aide to the revered cleric said Sistani would not call for protests even if his reservations over the law were ignored.

The political machinations come amid an upsurge of violence which Sunday killed a British security guard and his Canadian colleague in the northern city of Mosul, and left scores of US soldiers and Iraqis wounded.

But the boldest attack was a failed assassination bid against interim Iraqi public works minister Nasreen Barwari, a 37-year-old Kurd and the only woman in the government, east of Mosul.

She escaped unharmed, but three of her bodyguards were killed and a fourth wounded.

Early Monday, three Iraqi paramilitary police were wounded in a landmine explosion near Baquba, north of Baghdad, police said.

A series of explosions and mortar attacks rocked residential neighborhoods in Samarra, further to the north, overnight but police said there were no immediate reports of casualties.

Late Sunday, a man and his wife were killed when an explosive charge blew up as they were walking near a school in the center of Samarra, 120km north of Baghdad, Lieutenant Colonel Rashid Omar Ali said Monday.

In the capital, an order from US overseer Paul Bremer to shut down for 60 days a weekly newspaper owned by a firebrand Shia cleric, on charges of inciting violence, has stirred protests.