About 450 detainees have been released from Iraqi and US-run prisons under a national reconciliation plan aimed at bringing insurgents into the political process and ending the deadly tide of bloodshed in Iraq. But almost 70 people have been killed in attacks across the country over the past 24 hours, including 22 people blown up by a motorbike bomb while they were watching a World Cup match in a largely Shiite village.
The detainees held at Abu Ghraib and other facilities run by the US military and Iraqis were freed under an amnesty contained in the reconciliation plan presented to parliament on Sunday by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
The New York Times reported that Sunni-led insurgents groups have approached the Iraqi government with offers to start negotiations on the basis the reconciliation plan.
"There are signals" from "some armed groups to sit at the negotiating table," Iraqi lawmaker Hassan al-Suneid, a member of Maliki's Shiite Dawa party, told the newspaper Tuesday.
A US military spokesman in charge of detainee operations said that all of the 2,500 inmates released since Maliki first unveiled his initiative on June 6 are just suspected of being involved in the insurgency but have committed no violent crimes like bombing, killing, torture and kidnapping.
"Your release today is part of the prime minister's national reconciliation plan," national security advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie told the prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison before they were loaded on to buses.
"This is not a political game, it is a sincere attempt of reconciliation and to unite Iraq."
Almost 13,000 detainees remain in US custody.
Although there have been numerous detainee releases from Abu Ghraib and other US-run facilities since the April 2004 prisoner abuse scandal, both US and Iraqi authorities were eager to link the latest releases to the Maliki plan.
"There must have been a good security reason for them to be arrested. They all were detained for security reasons," Rubaie told AFP.
But this was disputed by many freed detainees.
"What is this reconciliation plan? I have always been an innocent man and never fought with anyone on the basis of religion, but look what happened to me," Abbas Hamid from Baghdad, who was imprisoned for five months, said angrily.
One of the main items in Maliki's 24-point reconciliation programme promised amnesty only to those detainees who have committed no crimes.
But some influential Sunni Arab leaders like Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi have said that without a clear and unconditional amnesty to all "resistance fighters" the plan would do little to stem the insurgency, which has now branched out into vicious sectarian violence.
"We were expecting a clear nod to the resistance and a clear strategy on how to lure it to the political process, but the plan has fallen short of that," he told AFP on Monday.
This manifested itself on the ground over the past 24 hours in acts of violence that have claimed the lives of almost 70 people.
In the ethnic tinderbox northern city of Kirkuk, at least three people were killed and 26 wounded when a suicide bomber exploded his vehicle as civil servants were filling their tanks at a petrol station, police said.
The death tolls from attacks on Monday also rose.
Twenty-two people, including children, were killed and 40 wounded when a motorbike bomb exploded in a market square where villagers were watching a World Cup football match in the mainly Shiite village of Khairnabat, northeast of Baghdad, a security official said.
Another attack in a busy market in the predominantly Shiite city of Hilla, south of Baghdad, killed 10 people and wounded 79.
In further violence on Tuesday, three policemen were killed and four wounded when their patrol hit a roadside bomb in the central Karradah district of Baghdad, a hospital said.
The US military said one of its soldiers was killed in a bomb attack while on foot patrol in the capital and that another soldier was killed in fighting in the volatile Al-Anbar province, west of the capital.
Gunmen also shot a civilian waiting at a petrol station in Baghdad.
There was no word on 10 Sunni Arab students kidnapped from their hostel in Karradah on Monday.
