BAGHDAD : The spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority escaped an assassination bid, as two young Iraqis accused by insurgent groups of collaborating with US occupiers were shot dead by masked men in the restive town of Fallujah west of Baghdad.

Initial reports of the assassination attempt on Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani were sketchy. But a source close to Sistani told AFP a man was intercepted by bodyguards as he tried to break into the ayatollah's office to carry out "a criminal act targeting" the ayatollah.

A Sunni member of the Iraq Governing Council, mindful of a possible backlash against the minority which once backed Saddam immediately denounced the attack on Sistani.

"This horrible act aims only to divide the Iraqi people but it will fail," said Nasir Chaderchi.

Asked whether Sistani's insistence on elections could have been behind the assassination attempt, Chaderchi said: "Everyone wants elections in Iraq, some want them before the transfer of power and some after."

The foiled attack came a day before a team of UN experts was due in Baghdad to assess the feasibility of Sistani's demand for direct elections for Iraq's first post-occupation government to properly reflect his community's demographic weight.

The evaluation team -- the first full-scale UN mission to the country since it pulled out its international staff after a deadly bombing last year -- was due to arrive Friday and stay for about 10 days.

The two Iraqis shot dead in Fallujah were identified as Saadun Shukr and Mustafa Zoubai, both 25 and unemployed.

Flyers distributed by masked men in the city after the killings said "two master spies who were denouncing the sons of Fallujah have been shot dead."

They were signed the "Mujahedeen," or holy warriors.

In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government also continued to take heat over its pre-war information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, after Blair admitted even he had been in the dark about a key piece of intelligence.

Opposition lawmakers questioned why Blair, who claimed before the war that Iraq could unleash chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes, had not known whether this referred to missiles or shorter-range "battlefield" weapons.

Blair on Wednesday told the House of Commons that even with British troops poised to enter Iraq in March last year to unseat Saddam he had not been clear about this.

It brought a scathing response from the leader of the main opposition Conservative Party, Michael Howard.

"If I were prime minister and I had failed to ask that basic question before committing our country to war I would be seriously considering my position," Howard said.

The US military meanwhile confirmed that one soldier had been killed and another wounded in a Baghdad mortar attack.

"One Combined Joint Task Force Seven soldier was killed and another was wounded at approximately 2:15 pm (1115 GMT) in a mortar attack at a checkpoint outside of Baghdad International Airport," said the US army in a press release.

Also Thursday, Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda Islamic militant network emerged as a prime suspect behind twin suicide bombings that killed at least 105 people in the Kurdish city of Arbil, in northern Iraq, on Sunday.

"The first indications point at al-Qaeda," Kosrat Rasul, deputy chief of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), told AFP in the northern oil centre of Kirkuk.

- AFP

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