Iraqi prime minister faults Sunni VP

Iraqi authorities are still holding 43 foreigners after the shooting of a girl.

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

BAGHDAD — A rift in the highest levels of Iraq’s government widened Tuesday and threatened to undermine U.S. efforts to unite the fractious central government behind compromises on distributing oil revenues and other key issues.

In an interview with an Iraqi newspaper, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, accused the country’s Sunni vice president of blocking key legislation approved by Iraq’s Shiite-dominated parliament. Al-Maliki also suggested that the parliament’s largest Sunni bloc, the Iraqi Accordance Front, isn’t representative of the country’s Sunni minority.

“There are 26 laws that are blocked in the presidency council, and it is the vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, who is blocking them,” al-Maliki said in the interview, which was published Tuesday in the Dar al Hayat newspaper.

Al-Maliki didn’t elaborate on the 26 laws to which he was referring. Al-Hashemi could not be reached to comment.

Meanwhile, an Iraqi military spokesman said authorities were still holding 43 foreigners who were detained Monday after private security guards shot and wounded a girl in Baghdad’s Karrada district. The spokesman raised the possibility that authorities might use the case to test a U.S. decree that grants private security contractors immunity for their actions under Iraqi law.

“The law will deal with it as would any law in any country,” said Qassim Atta, the spokesman for Baghdad’s security forces. “Nothing stands in the way of the law.”

He said the convoy the guards were protecting was traveling on the wrong side of the road when the girl was shot. He said that charges could range from driving on the wrong side of the street to firing weapons randomly.

He said 12 of those detained were security guards and the other 31 were passengers in the convoy, which was operated by ALMCO, a Dubai company with several U.S. reconstruction contracts.

Al-Maliki’s latest verbal flare-up comes as U.S. officials are urging Iraqi leaders to use a relative lull in violence to broker peace among the country’s rival Shiite and Sunni Arabs and Kurds and to act more quickly to address the country’s key issues.