Top U.S. official in Iraq escaped injury in guerrilla attack on

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian official in Iraq, said Friday he was not hurt in a guerrilla attack on his convoy early this month. The military said the assault was carried out with a roadside bomb and small arms fire.

The Dec. 6 attack on Bremer's convoy was not reported at the time, but a U.S. spokesman said Friday it had occurred on the same day Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was visiting the Iraqi capital. The attack was first reported Thursday by NBC News.

"As you can see, it didn't succeed," Bremer told reporters Friday during a visit to Basra, Iraq's second-largest city.

Bremer's convoy was near Baghdad airport when the roadside bomb exploded and guerrillas fired on his armored car, said Dan Senor, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition.

Also Friday, in the second major attack on a key Shiite Muslim organization this week, an Iraqi woman died in a bomb attack on a Baghdad branch of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Party officials blamed loyalists to Saddam Hussein.

He said there was no evidence attackers knew Bremer was in the convoy, calling it "premature" to suggest insurgents had planned an assassination. He said the Bremer trip was unscheduled and on a route where Americans are attacked frequently.

"It was probably a random kind of attack," he told a news conference. "Attacks occur there all the time and he happened to drive through it."

Bremer has not curtailed his movements, Senor said. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush was only told about the attack on Bremer after the first news reports surfaced about it Thursday. He declined to explain why Bush wasn't told earlier.

Several attacks on U.S. forces and Iraqi police in recent days have claimed more than a dozen lives in Baghdad and in predominantly Sunni areas west and north of the capital, once Saddam's power base.

U.S. forces also have conducted major operations in Samarra, a focus of guerrilla resistance 60 miles north of Baghdad, since Saddam was captured about 20 miles north of there on Saturday.

Military officials say attacks on Americans have decreased, but Iraqis have become more frequent targets as the guerrillas shift tactics in their attempt to snarl the U.S. occupation.

Friday morning, a homemade roadside bomb hit a U.S. truck, wounding two American soldiers, said Capt. Tammy Galloway of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. She said the explosion occurred in the town of Hit, 90 miles northwest of Baghdad.

In the bomb attack on the office of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Rahim Jabar, who lives in the building, said his sister was killed and seven residents were wounded. The explosion destroyed the office, which was in the front half of a one-story building. The back of the building had been taken over by families made homeless by the war.

In the holy Shiite city of Najaf on Friday, officials said an angry crowd attacked and killed Ali al-Zalimi, a former official of Saddam's Baath party. Al-Zalimi was believed to have played a role in crushing a 1991 Shiite uprising.

Overnight, some 140 U.S. soldiers from the 3rd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division raided a neighborhood near Baghdad's airport and arrested five suspects, the military said. They included a suspected bomb maker, Capt. Joel Kostelac said.