Middle Orient

General Pervez Musharraf finally quit as army chief on Wednesday, trading the post for a second five-year term as president and fulfilling a promise many Pakistanis doubted he would keep.

Official negligence contributed to the death toll in Afghanistan’s biggest suicide bombing, which killed 72 people, most of them schoolboys, this month, the interior minister said on Tuesday.

Nine people were killed when a suicide bomber posing as a shepherd attacked police north of Baghdad on Tuesday and at least six civilians died in a spate of shootings by U.S. soldiers, security officials said.

Six people were killed when a suicide bomber attacked provincial police headquarters in Baquba north of Baghdad on Tuesday, police said.

U.S. troops killed five Iraqi civilians, including a child, in two separate shootings in the past two days, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.On Monday, U.S. troops targeting al Qaeda fighters in Baiji, 180 km (110 miles)

US President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki agreed Monday to hold formal talks next year to decide the future of US forces in Iraq and other thorny issues, the White House said.

An Iraqi journalist said on Monday gunmen went on a killing spree in his Baghdad home, murdering seven children and four adult relatives, but Iraq’s interior ministry denied the attack took place.

 Iranian Parliament Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel said those countries which have been invited by the US to attend the so-called Middle-East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland are not able to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli issue.

Ivory Coast’s foreign minister conferred with his Iranian counterpart about bilateral ties as well as regional and international issues in a meeting here in Tehran on Tuesday.

Iran’s judiciary power said here Tuesday that investigations into former Iranian nuclear negotiator Hossein Moussavian, who was detained briefly this year on suspicion of espionage, exonerated him from a majority but not all, crimes.