Sadr threatens

A rebel Shi'ite cleric threatened yesterday to unleash suicide bombers if US forces attacked Iraq's holy city of Najaf and US Marines said they might renew an assault on the Sunni bastion of Falluja.

Fighters loyal to the cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, ambushed a military convoy in the Shi'ite shrine city of Kerbala and clashed with Bulgarian troops deployed there.

The Bulgarian Defence Ministry said one of its soldiers died after being wounded in the ambush of an armoured troop carrier near Kerbala city hall.

"We will shed blood to keep our holy city," Sadr, who is based in Najaf, said in a Friday sermon in the next door town of Kufa. He said many men and women had asked his blessing for "martyrdom operations" against the Americans.

"I keep telling them to wait. But if there was an assault on our cities or on our religious authorities, we will be time bombs and will not stop before destroying enemy forces."

US forces are poised just outside Najaf and have vowed to kill or capture Sadr and destroy his Mehdi Army militia, but have allowed time for talks to defuse the standoff.

The Mehdi Army rose up across the mainly Shi'ite south this month, but US-led forces have regained control of most towns.

Sadr's fighters still operate in Kerbala and Najaf, which lie in a swathe of south-central Iraq supervised by a Polish-led multinational force.

Further south, an Italian soldier was wounded when his patrol came under fire near a polling station for a local election in Gharraf, near the town of Nassiriya. An Italian military spokesman said the election had been postponed.

Guns were quiet in the Sunni stronghold of Falluja, but a US officer said Marines were ready to resume an offensive against insurgents in the city of 300,000.

Civilian volunteers used picks and shovels to dig bodies from houses flattened in fierce fighting in Falluja earlier this month. Witnesses said three bodies had been recovered in the battered Golan district. Seven were found on Thursday.

Colonel John Coleman, chief of staff of 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said a possible new offensive would take on Saddam Hussein loyalists, foreign fighters, Muslim militants and armed criminals he said might join the fray.