Baghdad under curfew amid fears of new violence

The streets of the city fell silent, apart from the rumble of US armoured cars and helicopter gunships and the occasional dull thud of an explosion.

"The curfew was implemented on the advice of multinational forces to the prime minister because they felt violence would increase today," interior ministry spokesman Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf told AFP.

A US military spokesman would not say why it had recommended a curfew but only that "intermittent curfews have been an effective means of reducing violence in the past".

On Friday, US forces arrested a security guard of Adnan Dulaimi, a leading lawmaker and head of the main Sunni bloc in Iraq's parliament and fragile coalition government, the National Concord Front.

"The detained individual is suspected of involvement in the planning of a multi-vehicle suicide operation inside Baghdad's International Zone," a US military statement said, alleging the suspect was a member of al-Qaeda.

Dulaimi demanded the release of his guard, but told AFP that US forces had been polite and had not entered his home itself, but had searched the nearby guards' quarters with sniffer dogs before making the arrest.

One week into the annual Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Baghdad is in the grip of an intense wave of sectarian and insurgent violence, which Iraqi and United Nations officials report is now killing more than 100 people per day.

Police said Saturday that over the previous 24 hours they had found the corpses of 23 unidentified murder victims in Baghdad, 13 of them in largely Sunni west Baghdad and 10 in the Shiite-dominated east.

On Wednesday, a US military spokesman said suicide attacks in the capital had reached their highest level since the US-lead invasion of 2003.

Civilian flights into Baghdad International Airport were cancelled Saturday, according to airport officials, while all pedestrian and road traffic was banned from the streets until at least 6:00 a.m. on Sunday (0200 GMT).

Occasional cars with security clearance could be seen moving cautiously through deserted streets, while a column of US army Stryker armoured vehicles rolled over a bridge across the Tigris into the downtown Risafa district.

Police reported heavy fighting through the night in the southern flashpoint neighbourhood of Dura where Turki Abdel Jabbar al-Taif, one of the leaders of the powerful Sunni Marsumi tribe, was shot dead on Saturday.

In another high-profile assassination, the brother-in-law of the chief judge in the ongoing trial of Saddam Hussein was shot dead on Thursday night.

It was not immediately clear whether the judge's family had been shot by the ousted dictator's supporters in order to intimidate him, or simply because they were Shiites living in a Sunni district in the grip of sectarian fighting.

The killings came after the supposed leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq released a recorded message on the Internet in which he threatened a new "all-out offensive" against Iraq's US-backed government.

Meanwhile, in the town of Tall Afar, in the far northwest of the country, policemen opened fire on a suspicious vehicle heading towards them which then exploded, an apparent suicide car bomb, killing two people and wounding 30.

And in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, a major Iraqi security operation was under way to root out insurgent gangs that have been pursuing a sectarian dirty war in the mixed Sunni and Shiite region around Baquba.

"For the second day running our forces have launched raids and made detentions in western neighbourhoods of Baquba," said Brigadier General Shakr al-Kaabi of the 5th Iraqi Army Division.

"We have arrested 130 people, of whom 85 were wanted," he added. "Weapons and ammunition were seized in these neighbourhoods, including sticks of dynamite and artillery shells."

Western Baquba's neighbourhoods have seen some of the worst sectarian cleansing of the city, with hundreds of Shiite families forced to flee under threat of Sunni death squads.