IRAQ WRAPUP 5-Iraqi vice-president, minister wounded in bombing

BAGHDAD, Feb 26 (Reuters) Iraq's Shi'ite vice president and a cabinet minister were wounded in an apparent assassination attempt today when a bomb killed six people at a ministry in Baghdad where they were attending an official ceremony.

Police sources said Public Works Minister Riad Ghareeb, also a Shi'ite, had been seriously wounded when a bomb hidden at a ministry's meeting hall exploded. Aides to Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi said he escaped with light wounds caused by shrapnel.

The attack was the latest in a series that has defied a security crackdown in Baghdad that is seen as a final attempt to halt all-out civil war in Iraq.

Aides to the vice president, a member of the Shi'ite majority that dominates the US-backed government, said he was later discharged from a US military hospital in the Green Zone, a vast government compound that also houses the US embassy, and that he had returned to his office.

Police said he was still in hospital.

''He has light shrapnel wounds in different parts of his body but it is not serious,'' a political source from the ruling Shi'ite Alliance said, referring to the vice president.

Abdul-Mahdi is one of Iraq's two vice presidents. The other vice president is Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab.

The cause of the blast was under investigation. But militants are increasingly using suicide vests to launch attacks due to tighter checks on roads aimed at reducing car bombs.

One witness told Reuters the force of the blast had thrown Abdul-Mahdi against a wall at the ministry, in the Sunni Arab neighbourhood of Mansour in western Baghdad.

''When the blast occurred, Abdul-Mahdi was thrown against the wall. All his guards threw themselves on top of him,'' the witness said.

Ghareeb's deputy had also been taken to hospital. Several senior ministry officials were among those killed, police said.

The bomb wounded 31 people.

Iraq's leaders are often targeted by militants engaged in Shi'ite-Sunni sectarian fighting.

Around 100,000 US and Iraqi troops have been deployed in Baghdad, the epicentre of Iraq's violence, to carry out the nearly two-week old security plan.

Despite the push, violence has continued every day, piling pressure on Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to crack down on both Sunni Arab insurgents and Shi'ite militias.

A female suicide bomber killed 40 people in a college in Baghdad on Sunday and a truck bomb near a Sunni mosque in western Anbar province killed 52 on Saturday. The second attack was blamed on al Qaeda militants striking back at local Sunni tribes opposed to the Islamist group.

IRANIAN WEAPONS Renewing accusations that Iranian-made weapons are being used by Iraqi militants fighting American troops, the US military showed today what it said was a large cache of Iranian bombs found in a raid north of Baghdad on Saturday.

The cache, displayed to reporters at a US military base in Baghdad, included components to make sophisticated roadside bombs, mortar bombs and rockets.

Washington, which accuses Shi'ite Iran of fanning violence in Iraq, is particularly concerned about so-called ''explosively formed penetrators'', a deadly Iranian-made roadside bomb the US military says has killed 170 US soldiers in Iraq since 2004. Tehran denies it fuels violence in Iraq.

Military officials said the weaponry showed today was clearly made in Iran. They said there was no way to know if the Iranian government was involved in supplying the weapons.

The attack in which Abdul-Mahdi was hurt came while Iraqi President Jalal Talabani was in Jordan undergoing medical tests after suffering extreme exhaustion and dehydration.

A day after anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr publicly attacked the security crackdown, his aides said the firebrand had not withdrawn his support for the plan.

Sadr, who led his Mehdi Army militia in two uprisings against US forces in Iraq in 2004, complained in a statement yesterday the plan had failed to stop violence and that it was no benefit in it because it was controlled by US forces.

Mehdi Army militiamen have so far avoided a confrontation with US and Iraqi forces sweeping the capital.

Despite recent bomb attacks, the US military said the security crackdown had cut sectarian killings in Baghdad to their lowest level in nearly a year.

REUTERS SAM RK2105