Postwar Iraq chaos stalls U.S. inquiries

[Barrett808]

WASHINGTON Investigators have recovered a severed hand, an Iraqi license plate and vehicle parts bearing a unique identification number from a Russian flatbed truck that carried the tremendous bomb that exploded Aug. 19 outside the United Nations mission in Baghdad, senior government officials say.

Normally a rich collection of clues like these is enough to crack just about any criminal case in the United States. It was this kind of physical evidence that enabled investigators to quickly solve the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 and the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.

But the evidence so far has proved to be of little help in Iraq, where a suicide bomber struck again Monday at the UN mission in Baghdad, killing himself and an Iraqi police officer, the officials said.

The problem, investigators said, is that classic crime-solving techniques rapidly run into the harsh realities of postwar Iraq, which is almost devoid of police records and motor vehicle registration files, not to speak of more exotic items like databases of fingerprints or DNA.

"There are unique challenges over there," said Larry Mefford, a senior FBI official in charge of counterterrorism investigations. "But we're making headway, and we're still in the mode of collecting information to see if we can better understand who is behind the bombings."

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