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Iraq's Shi'ite vice-president and a cabinet minister were wounded in an apparent assassination attempt Monday when a bomb killed six people at a ministry in Baghdad where they were attending an official ceremony.

Police sources said Public Works Minister Riad Ghareeb, also a Shi'ite, had been seriously wounded in the blast at a hall of the ministry. Aides to Vice-President Adel Abdul-Mahdi said he was suffering light wounds caused by shrapnel.

The attack was the latest in a series that defied a security crackdown in Baghdad that is seen as a final attempt to halt all-out civil war in Iraq.

Aides to the vice-president, a member of the Shi'ite majority that dominates the US-backed government, said he was later discharged from a US military hospital in the Green Zone, a vast government compound that also houses the US Embassy, and that he had returned to his office.

Police said he was still in hospital.

"He has light shrapnel wounds in different parts of his body but it is not serious," a political source from the ruling Shi'ite Alliance said, referring to the vice-president.
 
The cause of the blast was under investigation. But militants are increasingly using suicide vests to launch attacks due to tighter checks on roads aimed at reducing car bombs.

One witness said the force of the blast had thrown Abdul-Mahdi against a wall at the ministry, in the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Mansour in western Baghdad.

"When the blast occurred, Abdul-Mahdi was thrown against the wall. All his guards threw themselves on top of him," the witness said.

Ghareeb's deputy had also been taken to hospital. Several senior ministry officials were among those killed, police said. The bomb wounded 31 people.

Iraq's leaders are often targeted by militants engaged in Shi'ite-Sunni sectarian fighting.

Around 100,000 US and Iraqi troops have been deployed in Baghdad, the epicenter of Iraq's violence, to carry out the nearly two-week old security plan.

Despite the push, violence has continued every day, piling pressure on Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to crack down on both Sunni Arab insurgents and Shi'ite militias.

A female suicide bomber killed 40 people in a college in Baghdad on Sunday and a truck bomb near a Sunni mosque in western Anbar province killed 52 on Saturday.

Iranian weapons

Renewing accusations that Iranian-made weapons are being used by Iraqi militants fighting American troops, the US military showed Monday what it said was a large cache of Iranian bombs found in a raid north of Baghdad on Saturday.

The cache, displayed to reporters at a US military base in Baghdad, included components to fabricate sophisticated roadside bombs, mortar bombs and rockets.

Washington, which accuses Shi'ite Iran of fanning violence in Iraq, is particularly concerned about so-called "explosively formed penetrators", a deadly Iranian-made roadside bomb the US military says has killed 170 US soldiers in Iraq since 2004. Teheran denies it fuels violence in Iraq.

Military officials said the weaponry showed Monday was clearly made in Iran. They said there was no way to know if the Iranian government was involved in supplying the weapons. 
 
(China Daily via agencies February 27, 2007)