As parliament met and Shi?ite Prime Minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki wrestled with factional disputes to form a government of national unity, six bombs exploded in Baghdad, including one at the main entrance leading to Baghdad airport. Dozens were wounded in the attacks.

Hospital sources said three people were killed in the blast in the airport area, a sprawling compound that houses the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq.

No one was hurt in Saturday?s shrine attacks around the small town of Wajihiya. Residents expressed anger and concern that militants were trying to create friction in their mixed Sunni and Shi?ite community, which is typical of the region.

Two of the shrines ? mostly one-room buildings attached to the tombs of noted clerics ? honoured relatives of two Shi?ite imams commemorated at the Golden Mosque in Samarra, where a bombing in February sparked weeks of communal bloodshed.

Residents of Wajihiya, a town of about 5 000 people 30 km (20 miles) east of the regional capital Baquba, showed reporters five sites where explosions after dark had damaged the shrines, the most notable of which was dedicated to Abdullah bin Ali al- Hadi. A sixth was blown up in countryside nearby, police said.

?This is a quiet place. We live in harmony with each other,? local man Faez Abbas, 26, said, adding that Sunnis also used the shrines for worship ? a common practice in Iraq, although shrines are most often set up by Shi?ites.

Iraqi and U.S. officials have said the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is targeting majority Shi?ites in an attempt to provoke retaliatory attacks against minority Sunnis and ignite a sectarian civil war.

Raed Rasheed, governor of Diyala province, where the mixed Sunni, Shi?ite and Kurdish populations have suffered heavily from guerrilla violence, condemned the bombings and also criticised his police force for failing to protect the shrines.

Several other small shrines were attacked after the destruction of Samarra?s Golden Mosque on February 22.

Widely blamed on al Qaeda?s Sunni Islamist guerrillas ? although they have denied it ? the Samarra bombing provoked reprisal attacks by Shi?ites and a wave of sectarian bloodshed that has pitched Iraq toward civil war.

Shi?ites, repressed under Saddam Hussein, are the majority community in the country and now hold sway. The Sunnis were dominant in Saddam?s era.

Constitutional deadline

Five months after parliamentary elections, Maliki has another week to present a cabinet to parliament under a constitutional deadline set when he was appointed in April.

As parliament gathered for only its third full day of normal business since the December election, a small but influential Shi?ite party that has been complicating Maliki?s task renewed its rejection of his offers.

The Fadhila party, a member of the dominant Shi?ite Islamist Alliance which chose Maliki as premier, is struggling to keep control of the Oil Ministry.

Other Alliance leaders want that vital post to go to Hussain al-Shahristani, a prominent Islamist and nuclear physicist once jailed and tortured by Saddam.

Negotiators said yesterday Shahristani was still favorite.

In the deadliest blast in the capital on Sunday, six people, including three policemen, were killed by a bomb aimed at a police patrol in the mainly Sunni district of Aadhamiya.

Four people were killed and five wounded when a bomb aimed at an Iraqi police convoy went off near Beirut Square in northeastern Baghdad.

An attack targeting a checkpoint manned by Interior Ministry forces in Tayaran Square in central Baghdad killed two and wounded five. The victims? identities were unclear.

In the northern city of Mosul, clashes erupted between insurgents and Iraqi security forces fighting alongside U.S. troops yesterday, killing one policeman and wounding three, sources said.

Aseel KAMI