The guards extricated him by Jeep through a dirt track.The clash, the most serious since Mr Arafat’s funeral on Friday, came on a day when the transitional leadership announced that Palestinian voters would go to the polls on 9 January to choose his successor as president. It underlined the difficulties Abu Mazen faces in asserting his authority and establishing the tranquillity necessary for free elections.Nominations will be open from Saturday. The Fatah revolutionary council will meet in the next two or three days to select its candidate. Abu Mazen, 69, a taciturn former prime minister, is the front-runner.Officials cautioned, however, against taking his nomination for granted. Two guards were killed and 10 others wounded.
The shooting occurred shortly after the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, announced plans to meet moderate Palestinian leaders later this month in an early indication of America’s readiness to become involved in a Middle East peace process.Witnesses said that the Gaza confrontations began at 3pm when fighters of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades armed with rockets and automatic rifles marched on the site Al-Aqsa is the militia of Mr Arafat’s Fatah movement. He is a veteran of Palestinian revolutionary politics who returned with Mr Arafat from exile a decade ago, but his appeal to the Palestinian street is limited. Dissident Palestinian gunmen exchanged fire in Gaza yesterday with security guards protecting Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, the transitional leader, when he visited a mourning site for Yasser Arafat.

The mutilated body of a Western woman was found by American forces in Fallujah yesterday, lying on the street covered with a blood-soaked cloth.
The body could not be examined immediately because of fears that it might conceal some sort of booby-trap, but a US Marines officer said he was “80 per cent certain” that the victim was Western.Margaret Hassan, the 59-year-old British-Iraqi director of Care International, and Teresa Borcz Khalifa, a 54-year-old Polish-born woman, are the only two known Western women hostages in Iraq.However, in previous instances, bodies thought to be those of Western women turned out to be those of Iraqis.. They will then decide on actions, including possibly referring Iran to the UN Security Council, which could lead to sanctions, although Iran’s move appeared to make it less likely that would happen.Last week, diplomats said Iranian officials had presented British, French and German envoys in Tehran with an unacceptable version of the agreement.The main area of dispute was over the conversion of uranium into gas, which when spun in centrifuges can be enriched to lower levels for producing electricity or processed into high-level, weapons grade uranium, the diplomats said.. The report is now expected to be released today.The IAEA study on nearly two decades of clandestine activities that the United States asserts is a secret weapons programme will be reviewed by the agency’s 35-nation board of governors when they meet on 25 November. Iran’s stated intentions will be included in a report prepared by IAEA head, Mohamed ElBaradei.The IAEA delayed circulating the report on Iran’s nuclear activities to diplomats working with the agency to give French, German and British negotiators more time to work out differences with their Iranian counterparts over the weekend.

“It’s what the Europeans were looking for.”Iran has stressed that the suspension is only temporary, but added that it would remain in place so long as negotiations continued over possible European aid for its nuclear power programme. “We have accepted the suspension as a voluntary step and it does not create any obligations for us,” said Mr Rohani’s deputy, Hossein Mousavian, said on Iranian state television, emphasizing that his country viewed the decision as a confidence building move and not a legal obligation on the part of Iran.As part of the agreement, “Europe will support Iran’s joining the international group of states possessing the ability to manufacture nuclear fuel”, once the suspension ends, Mr Mousavian added.The EU diplomat said Iran had also fulfilled a key part of the deal by formally informing the UN nuclear watchdog agency of its decision, which makes it legally binding. There aren’t going to be large numbers of civilians killed and certainly not by US forces,” he said.In addition to the 38 Americans and six Iraqis killed in the assault, more than 200 US soldiers were injured. About 400 suspected insurgents have been arrested in Fallujah including “some” foreigners, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said.The Iraq Coalition Casualties website reported that, as of Saturday, 1,181 US troops had been killed in Iraq. “It’s a full suspension,” said the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. The United States claims that Iran has been secretly developing weapons-grade uranium for the past 20 years under cover of its nuclear power programme.The announcement follows weeks of negotiations with EU representatives.A senior EU diplomat said Iran had agreed to all points of a preliminary deal hammered out in Paris a week ago.