“What everyone agrees on is that elections are terribly important,” Brahimi (AFP)

BAGHDAD, February 13 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – A top U.N. envoy Friday, February 13, stressed that elections in Iraq is very important yet complicated process, but he failed to set a timetable for the polls in the power-vacuumed country.

Holding elections for a post-occupation government in Iraq is “terribly important” but organizing them is a “very complicated process,” Lakhdar Brahimi said in a press conference in Baghdad.

“The Iraqi street must know that elections are a very complicated process and cannot be achieved unless there are good preparations, so that every one accepts the results,” he said, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

But the top U.N. envoy refused to specify whether a vote could be held before a June 30 deadline planned for the handover of political power from the U.S.-led occupation forces to an Iraqi authority as demanded by the country's leading Shiite Muslim leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

He said the U.N. might suggest a date for polls in about a week, and added that the world body “would like to present every step of the way” in Iraq's march toward elections.

Sistani, who met with Brahimi in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, on Thursday has insisted on early full elections, something the U.S.-led occupying forces say is not feasible.

The U.S. says there is not time to organize free and fair elections before the 30 June handover. It wants regional meetings to select a new government, which in turn would draft a constitution - with elections postponed until at least the end of 2005.

Many Iraqis fear delaying elections could block efforts to end the U.S. military occupation of their country, that has the world’s second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Brahimi is to submit a proposal for a feasible timetable to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Ahmed Fawzi, a spokesman for Brahimi told the BBC earlier in the day that elections “will take place when the country is ready and that will be after the handover of power”.

“It's not a question of delaying (the handover). It's finding a new timetable,” he said.

Diplomats said Brahimi agreed with Sistani that a method should be found to choose an interim Iraqi government other than a U.S. plan for caucuses in Iraq's 18 provinces.

However, one U.S. official said Brahimi is likely to recommend a method similar to caucuses but call them indirect elections to mollify Sistani. Brahimi is to return to New York City next week, USA Today reported.

Fresh Deaths

In the meantime, the U.S. military on Friday announced the loss of another soldier in Iraq.

It said a military police soldier was killed and two were wounded when a bomb struck an army patrol near the Abu Ghraib district of Baghdad at around 10:40 pm (1940 GMT) Thursday.

Meanwhile, the controversy over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was set to rage on, with the USA Today reporting that a classified U.S. intelligence study done three months before the U.S.-British invasion of the country predicted that the weapons might never be found

The  newspaper said the December 2002 study by a team of US intelligence analysts, military officers and Pentagon civilians warned that US tactics, guerrilla warfare, looting and lying by Iraqi officials would undermine the search for banned Iraqi weapons.

The findings diverge from pre-invasion statements by U.S. officials saying that caches of banned weapons would be found in Iraq.

Nine months into the invasion of Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, triggering fears that the offensive was launched on false pretexts against the oil-rich country.