U.N. team meets with Iraq council
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Prince Charles talks with British troops during his visit to Basra on Sunday.
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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- U.N. delegates are meeting with members of Iraq's Governing Council on the viability of letting Iraqis hold independent elections by June 30.
The U.N. team -- led by Lakhdar Brahimi, special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- arrived in Baghdad on Saturday.
"The U.N. team will endeavor to meet with representatives of all constituencies and listen to all Iraqi views and perspectives," Annan said in a statement from New York.
"I hope the work of this team will help resolve the impasse over the transitional political process leading to the establishment of a provisional government for Iraq."
However, in the end, Annan said, Iraqis must reach a consensus to make a new government "legitimate and credible."
A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq said the U.N. delegates would receive the full support of the coalition military.
"The U.N. team will be operating as an independent entity in Iraq," said Dan Senor, spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority. "We will be here to provide them with logistical and security support, but we will not be coordinating with them."
Most U.N. officials pulled out of Iraq in October, following a bomb attack on the group's Baghdad headquarters in August that killed 22 people, including top U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.
The coalition had asked the United Nations to send a team of experts to explore the possibility of direct elections largely as a result of complaints by Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Sistani, a proponent of early direct elections, has criticized the Coalition Provisional Authority's caucus-style handover plan.
Under that plan, backed by the Iraq Governing Council, a caucus system would pick a transitional national legislature by May 31. Sovereignty would then be handed over by the end of June. No direct elections would occur before 2005.
The coalition has said direct elections are not feasible before the planned June 30 handover. Sistani has indicated that he would be amenable to going along with U.N. findings.
Other developments
• Iraqi police told CNN they believe one of their own officers placed a bomb inside their station near Baghdad on Saturday morning, killing three policemen and wounding 11 others. It is the fourth attack on the Suwaira police station, but the first that has resulted in deaths. Iraq's police stations have been targets of numerous deadly bomb attacks by anti-coalition insurgents.
• The U.S. military said an active Iraqi police major was killed Sunday when he and two other men attacked U.S. soldiers in Khadissiya village, near Tikrit. The two other attackers were captured, the U.S. military said. At the time of the attack the soldiers -- according to the military -- were watching what was thought to be a house owned by someone responsible for rocket propelled grenade attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces.
• A U.S. soldier was killed Sunday afternoon near Mahmoudiyah, south of Baghdad, when an explosive device went off in the middle of a road. No details were immediately available. Since the war began 533 soldiers have died in Iraq, 370 of those killed in action.
• Prince Charles paid a surprise morale-boosting visit to British troops in Iraq on Sunday. Arriving on a Chinook helicopter at a British base that was one of Saddam Hussein's lavish palaces, Charles shook hands with soldiers and officials of the U.S.-led civil administration amid heightened security. (Full story)
• A contingent of Japanese troops crossed Sunday into Iraq from Kuwait as part of the country's first deployment to a combat zone since 1945. The troops, most of them engineers, are part of a deployment slated to total about 800 troops in a humanitarian mission in southern Iraq. (Full story)
• Coalition military spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said the U.S. military is committed to investigating allegations of sexual assaults on women troops stationed in Iraq. "We take those allegations very seriously, we conduct investigations very thoroughly and, as necessary, punish those appropriately," he said. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has ordered a 90-day investigation into the allegations. (Full story)
