Invalid ballots prompt recount

BAGHDAD -- Iraqi officials said yesterday that they must recount votes from about 300 ballot boxes because of various discrepancies, delaying the final results from the landmark national elections. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other ballots were declared invalid because of alleged tampering.

Meanwhile, the postelection violence mounted, raising fears that the Jan. 30 balloting had done little to ease the country's security crisis.

An American soldier was killed yesterday and one was wounded in an ambush north of the capital, the US military said. Two other American soldiers died earlier in the week, the command said yesterday.

Gunmen ambushed a convoy of Kurdish party officials in Baghdad, killing one and wounding four. And in the southern city of Basra, gunmen killed an Iraqi journalist working for a US-funded TV station and his 3-year-old son as they left their home.

Officials had promised final results from the elections by today, the end of the Iraqi workweek. Yesterday, however, Farid Ayar, election commission spokesman, said the deadline would not be met because of the recount.

''We don't know when this will finish," he said. ''This will lead to a little postponement in announcing the results."

No partial tallies have been released since Monday in the contests for the 275-member National Assembly, 18 provincial councils, and a regional parliament for the Kurdish self-governing region in the north.

The most recent figures suggested a coalition of Kurdish parties was in second place behind a Shi'ite-dominated ticket endorsed by Iraq's most revered Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The ticket of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite, was a distant third.

Allegations of voting irregularities, especially in the tense northern city of Mosul, have complicated the count. Some leading Sunni Arab and Christian politicians alleged that thousands of their supporters were denied the right to vote.

Election officials attributed the alleged problems in the Mosul area to security, which prevented fewer than a third of the planned 330 polling centers from opening. Gunmen seized some ballot boxes, officials said.

The commission would not say how many ballots had been declared invalid and whether they had come from the Mosul area, which has a mostly Sunni Arab population. Many Sunnis are believed to have stayed home on election day, either because they feared insurgent reprisals or opposed a ballot as long as US and other foreign troops were on Iraqi soil.

Adel al-Lami, a commission official, said the ballots in 40 boxes and 250 bags would not be counted because they appeared to have been stuffed inside them or, in some cases, improperly folded. Some of the boxes were not those approved by the commission, and others were improperly sealed, he said.

In other developments:

A Western legal specialist said investigative judges were nearly ready to hand over lengthy dossiers of affidavits, witness statements, and other documents to a five-judge panel that would run the trials for former members of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The specialist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not say which of Hussein's 11 lieutenants were likely to face the Iraqi Special Tribunal first, and it was unclear when the dictator himself would stand trial.

The American soldier was killed yesterday in an ambush near Balad, a major US base about 50 miles north of Baghdad. Another US soldier died Tuesday of a gunshot wound at the Balad base. A third was killed Sunday while on patrol in Mosul.

Police said they had no leads in the slaying of Abdul Hussein Khazal al-Basri, the correspondent for Al-Hurra TV station, and his son. Basri was also an official of the Islamic Dawa party, editor of a newspaper in Basra, and head of the press office of the Basra City Council.

It was unclear whether his affiliation with Al-Hurra was the motive for the slaying. The station, launched a year ago, was tailored for Arab audiences to compete with regional stations like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.

President Bush said it was created to ''cut through the hateful propaganda" broadcast in the Arab world.