The US military identified its latest prey as Wahid Hamed Tawfiq al-Tikriti, governor of the southern province of Basra, and Iraqi oil minister Amir Muhammed Rasheed, bringing the high-ranking officials of the Saddam regime in US custody to 15.

Al-Tikriti and Rasheed were No. 44 and No. 47 among a US list of the 55 most wanted former Iraqi officials.

Rasheed is husband of bioweapons scientist Rihab Taha, who is widely known as "Dr Germ," but is not on the list.

Al-Tikriti gave himself up in Baghdad and was being interrogated by US forces.

Meanwhile, the leader of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, was reportedly detained by the US for embezzlement on Tuesday.

The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV channel said Chalabi, a returned exile and US favorite in post-war Iraq, was detained after being found guilty of embezzlement activities, but the report did not elaborate.

Chalabi was not seen at a US-led conference on Iraq's political future on Monday.

Nearly 300 delegates from Iraq's diverse political and ethnic groupings attended the meeting chaired by retired US general Jay Garner, who is acting as chief civil administrator in the war and sanction-torn country.

They agreed to holding a national conference and forming an interim administration within four weeks.

It will take at least five years to rebuild Iraq, according to two influential US senators.

"Despite our satisfaction over the outcome of the combat phase of the (Iraq) war, we must recognize that we are probably closer to the beginning than to the end of our endeavors in Iraq," US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar said at a hearing in Washington, Tuesday.

"I've stated that it may take up to five years of efforts by coalition countries in Iraq to fully achieve our goals of stability, reconstruction, disarmament and democracy," the Republican senator said.

Joseph Biden, a Democrat and Lugar's predecessor, echoed the comments. "This (rebuilding Iraq) is going to require some significant time and significant resources. And I agree with the chairman," he said.

"We've both been talking about the notion that this can happen in months as being preposterous, and it's going to be somewhere in the range of five, or maybe more, years," Biden added.

"Iraq is not a prize," he said. "It's a complex society in a very tough neighborhood with incredibly, incredibly difficult problems to undertake and resolve."

In another development, Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television said on Tuesday US troops fired on a crowd overnight in a town west of Baghdad, killing 15 Iraqis and wounding about 50 others.

Jazeera's Baghdad correspondent, speaking on air by telephone, said the incident happened around midnight (2000 GMT Monday) in Falluja, some 50 km west of the capital, after someone in the crowd threw a stone at the US troops.

The crowd of about 200 had reportedly finished Muslim evening prayers at a mosque and answered a call by preachers to protest against the continued presence of US forces in Iraq.

Residents said the troops shot at unarmed protesters but the US military said its soldiers had merely retaliated after coming under fire when the crowd approached the school, which was used by a company -- 100 or so soldiers -- from the 82nd Airborne Division.

There has been some progress in the oil-for-food program, which has contributed a lot to relieving the Iraqi humanitarian crisis.

Thanks to a three-week extension granted by the UN Security Council, the office running the oil-for-food program is ready to identify more priority supplies to be shipped to Iraq.

The UN Office of the Iraq Program (OIP) said Tuesday the value of priority supplies that could be shipped to Iraq from the oil-for-food pipeline had surged nearly US$100 million, bringing the total to US$548.6 million.

"The increased value was directly related to the extension of time granted to suppliers under the new resolution," it said in a press release.

The office said it and other UN agencies and programs were continuing to identify the most easily accessible priority items in the pipeline and negotiate with suppliers to speed the shipment of supplies under already approved contracts.

The council on April 24 extended Secretary-General Kofi Annan's authority to run the humanitarian program for another three weeks, until June 3.

The program was temporarily halted on March 17 after the withdrawal of all UN staff from Iraq on the eve of hostilities. The council adopted a first resolution on March 28 giving Annan more authority to administer the operation for the next 45 days, including prioritizing deliveries and finding new entry ports to speed their shipment.

(Xinhua News Agency April 30, 2003)