"I'm about to talk to the multinational forces to reach solutions that will put an end to such practices," Mr. Maliki said of criminal behavior by soldiers. One possible course of action, he said, would be to "revise the issue of immunity."

"Our people cannot tolerate that every day there is an ugly crime such as that in Mahmudiya," he added, referring to the market town near which the four Iraqis, including a young girl, were killed on March 12.

Mr. Maliki's assertion, which followed similar remarks he made in Kuwait on Wednesday, signaled the growing furor within the Iraqi government over the latest crime. The incident first became public last week, when the Fourth Infantry Division announced that it was investigating the involvement of American soldiers in the rape and slayings.

The rise in political tensions came as sectarian violence continued in Iraq. A suicide car bomber rammed his sedan into a Shiite shrine in the holy town of Kufa, killing at least 12 people, including five Iranians, and injuring dozens, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi and American forces have generally maintained tight security around the southern holy sites of Najaf and Kufa, to which Shiite pilgrims, including many Iranians, flock by the thousands.

The strongly worded apology issued Thursday night by the top American commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad revealed the deep concern among American officials over the criminal episode's potential to damage the entire American project in Iraq.

"We understand this is painful, confusing and disturbing, not only to the family who lost a loved one, but to the Iraqi people as a whole," the two senior officials said in a written statement. "The loss of a family member can never be undone. The alleged events of that day are absolutely inexcusable and unacceptable behavior."

The statement is all the more unusual because no soldiers have been convicted yet or even formally charged. On Monday, a recently discharged Army private, Steven D. Green, 21, was arrested in North Carolina on suspicion of rape and murder. Three soldiers, some of whom are reported to have admitted their roles in the crime to investigators, are confined to base in Mahmudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad, and their weapons have been confiscated.

Mr. Green was moved on Thursday to Louisville, Ky., where, in a half-hour hearing in which he pleaded not guilty, a federal judge ordered continued detention for him. Prosecutors said that Mr. Green, who was discharged from the Army in May before his suspected role in the case was discovered, is scheduled to be arraigned on Aug. 8 in Paducah, Ky.

The mayor of Mahmudiya, Mouayid Fadhil, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that American military investigators wanted to dig up the victims' bodies. But Iraq's Justice Ministry must first determine whether exhumation is allowed under Koranic law, he said. The victims' relatives are also reluctant to divulge the burial site out of shame over the fact that one of the dead, a girl as young as 15, was reported to have been raped by at least two American soldiers, the mayor said.

Sexual assault is considered one of the most heinous and shameful crimes in Muslim society; even mentioning the subject is often considered taboo. "We don't want to talk about this," Mr. Fadhil said. "She was raped."

The debate over exhuming the bodies could complicate the military investigation. American military officials declined on Thursday to talk about specifics of the investigation, but prosecutors undoubtedly want detailed forensic evidence to build as strong a case as possible against the suspects. The victims were examined by doctors at the local hospital months ago before being buried, Mr. Fadhil said, but the Americans want to check the corpses for themselves.

The victim in the suspected rape was Abeer Qassim Hamzeh. The others killed were her younger sister, father and mother, Mr. Fadhil said.

The case is one of at least five in which the military is investigating or prosecuting soldiers in the killings of unarmed Iraqi civilians. Four were announced in June alone. The Mahmudiya case is the only one that involves the rape of an Iraqi, making it especially incendiary.

In another case, in which marines are suspected of killing 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha last November, the second-ranking American officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, has completed his review of an inquiry into whether Marine officers tried to cover up the shootings and is expected to announce his findings and recommendations in the next few days, said two military officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the findings have not been made public.

Mr. Maliki said at the news conference on Thursday that the Iraqi government would conduct its own inquiry into the Mahmudiya crime.

But Iraqi courts have no power to prosecute the soldiers. An order issued under the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which ruled Iraq after the American invasion until June 2004, said that foreign troops, missions and their consultants here are immune from Iraqi law. Orders issued by an occupational authority usually expire when the authority leaves, but the Iraqi constitution has extended the decrees.

Mr. Fadhil said that a committee of local officials was prepared to carry out its own criminal investigation but was awaiting orders from the national government. "Now, the subject has many dimensions," he said. "It's become an international affair."

Complicating matters, "the family doesn't want to say where the bodies are," he added. "The family didn't involve the police when the crime took place. We found out about it only when the Americans revealed it."

The American military began its investigation after a soldier described the crime in a counseling session in late June and said he had been involved. American soldiers were notified by Iraqis of the crime on March 12, the day it took place, military officials said. But the Iraqis who had stumbled on the bodies had speculated that other Iraqis had done the killing, since the area is a cauldron of sectarian violence. So the Americans did not think of investigating then, officials said.

A senior American commander in Mahmudiya visited Mr. Fadhil and other local officials on Thursday and "expressed sorrow for the killing of the family and the behavior of the soldiers," Mr. Fadhil said.

He added that the local investigative committee intended to examine the victims' home. The American soldiers are accused of trying to cover up the crime by burning both the body of Ms. Hamzeh and the house. But the body was sufficiently intact for local doctors to find multiple bullet wounds, Mr. Fadhil said.

The violence in Iraq on Thursday threatened to ignite further sectarian bloodletting. The suicide car bomb in Kufa had been following two buses carrying Iranian pilgrims and was detonated when the pilgrims disembarked, said Capt. Salem Ghanem, the assistant director of tourist security in Najaf, which adjoins Kufa. Iraqi vendors who had gathered around the pilgrims were among the victims.

The explosion ripped into the two buses and left behind pools of blood, shredded shoes and bags with food that the pilgrims had been carrying.

Officials in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Kufa are hoping that religious tourism will help strengthen the local economy.

In Baghdad, two car bombs exploded near a high school, killing at least three people and injuring six. Gunmen in the town of Musayyib shot up a minivan, killing two girls who were just 4 and 6 years-old. Police found two bodies in the insurgent stronghold of Hawija; both the victims had been handcuffed and tortured.

In his afternoon news conference, Mr. Maliki said that the government has decided to ban all political activity on university campuses because of rampant violence.

He also said that a police force with thousands of members assigned to protect government buildings and other installations was filled with criminals and murderers. The declaration was an unusually blunt acknowledgment of the corruption that has plagued the Iraqi security forces. "It didn't really protect the ministries," he said of the force, called the Facilities Protection Service. "On the contrary, it turned into a partner in the killing."

With the 41 million votes counted, Calderon of President
Vicente Fox's National Action Party had 35.89 percent to 35.31 percent for Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party. The two were separated by 0.57 percent, or 236,006 votes.

Roberto Madrazo, whose Institutional Revolutionary Party controlled Mexico for 71 years until Fox's victory in 2000, had 22.27 percent, and two minor candidates split the rest.

Luis Carlos Ugalde, president of the Federal Electoral Institute, confimed Calderon as the winner Thursday night, several hours after the final vote count was released.

However, the official declaration of a president-elect must come from the Federal Electoral Tribunal, which has until Sept. 6 to announce. Meanwhile, any challenges will go before the tribunal court. The next president begins a single, six-year term on Dec. 1.

Mexican stocks closed 2.7 percent higher and the peso rebounded Thursday on the news of Calderon's lead. The markets closed before the count was finished.

But many obstacles remain in Calderon's path. If his victory is upheld by electoral courts, he will face a Congress dominated by opposition parties, as well as a divided nation that sends millions north to work in the United States illegally.

President Bush's decision to send National Guard troops to the border has increased tensions in Mexico, as has a U.S. congressional proposal to extend walls along the two countries' frontier.

Calderon wants to rely on Mexico's many free-trade accords to create jobs and crack down on rising crime, and says he'll try to smooth U.S. relations without letting Washington dominate.

"I want to establish a very constructive relationship without bowing my head and lowering my eyes to the Americans," Calderon said in heavily accented English during an interview with The Associated Press.

"I have met with President Bush several times. I have interviewed with President Bush and several members of the American Congress, and I know it's possible to establish a more constructive relationship, and that would be very good for both countries."

Addressing hundreds of cheering supporters before dawn Thursday, he called on Mexicans to move beyond the bitter campaign and "begin a new era of peace, of reconciliation."

He reached out to the millions of people who voted against him, asking for a "chance to win your confidence."

For months, Lopez Obrador had been the easy front-runner in the race, promising to govern for the poor and launch big public works projects. But he slipped in the polls after he refused to take part in the first of two televised debates, and never quite recovered.

"It was Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's election to lose, and he lost," said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

On Thursday, the former Mexico City mayor said that widespread fraud - not campaign missteps - cost him the election, and he called on his supporters to gather Saturday for an "informational assembly."

"We are always going to act in a responsible manner, but at the same time, we have to defend the citizens' will," he said.

He denounced election officials for going forward with an official count of poll-workers' vote tallies, as required by election law, and ignoring his demand for a ballot-by-ballot review.

"We are going to the Federal Electoral Tribunal with the same demand - that the votes be counted - because we cannot accept these results," Lopez Obrador said.

Lopez Obrador supporters who followed the folksy leftist with near religious zeal wept in the streets at news of his loss. A busload of children from a private school jeered at three women bawling uncontrollably as they held up banners.

As Lopez Obrador emerged from his apartment, one woman rushed forward and startled him with a desperate embrace. Taken aback for an instant, the candidate reassured her and kissed her gently on the top of the head. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

The partial "recount" began at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, in Mexico's 300 election districts - each with an average of 400 polling places and 140,000 votes to tabulate - and sparks are already flying over the struggle to conduct an authentic count in the sunlight of public scrutiny. Attorneys and party bosses of the PAN - whose triumphalism has turned to visible panic in recent hours - have orders from headquarters to universally oppose the reopening of any ballot boxes and subsequent public accounting of the actual number of votes cast for each candidate. On the other side, representatives of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) of candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador and many outraged citizens armed with video cameras have besieged the 300 recount locales demanding an actual ballot-by-ballot recount.

This first stage of the process is likely to take days: Results from more than 11,000 precincts (the ones hidden by IFE - in most of them, López Obrador won the vote) that must be recounted, vote-by-vote, in accordance with Mexican electoral law. That is an average of almost 40 polling places per district. And with two well-organized sides battling over whether the votes will be counted aloud, combined with the stonewalling incompetence that has been IFE's trademark, an already fragile process is coming apart at the seams.


Police cordon a Nezahuacoyotl garbage dump where ballots and ballot-boxes from three precincts won by López Obrador were discovered on Tuesday.
Photo: D.R. 2006 El Universal
One of the major problems for IFE and the Fox administration is that if they were to allow the bread-and-butter recount that the public demands, the ugly truth would come out that an unknown number of ballot boxes have "disappeared" in the past two days. The ballots from three precincts in the city of Nezahuacoyotl - a López Obrador stronghold - were discovered yesterday in the municipal garbage dump. The results from two of those precincts have been missing, since Sunday, from IFE's vote tallies. An IFE official, ambushed by television reporters, exacerbated the crime yesterday when she blamed the Mexican military: the Armed Forces, not IFE, are supposedly guarding the ballots, she said, in defense of her bureaucracy. This, sources close to the military told Narco News, produced significant anger among the military generals and troops who - if the public does not believe or accept IFE's final decision - will be called upon to quell the national rebellion that follows.

The Armed Forces are understandably concerned about the very real possibility that history will be repeated: that they will be turned into the scapegoats of a process-gone-awry. If, as in the 1960s and 1970s, the military is to be called upon to repress a civilian population's protests, highway blockades, strikes and occupations of government centers - steps that are inevitable if IFE refuses to recount the votes in public - the generals will be turned into the primary recipients of the national and global repudiation that follows. Significantly, and distinct from the presidential elections six years ago, the Armed Forces have remained totally silent. Missing from the usual script are the previously obligatory statements by the military that it will unconditionally back IFE's verdict. There is the real possibility that if President Fox decides to try to quell the social unrest, that the military will refuse to become his enforcing patsy.

Although many and vast, the various federal police agencies do not count with the numbers to successfully contain a national revolt. The events of June 14 in Oaxaca, when 15,000 striking teachers repelled the dawn attack by 3,000 riot cops, is still fresh in the collective memory. With mere sticks and stones they beat back the batons, shields, teargas bazookas, and real bullets from real guns, of the invading police, sent them running in retreat, and took back 56 blocks of the city's downtown. The Mexico from below is more organized, united, and sophisticated than ever before. And, perhaps ironically, it is precisely in the states traveled in recent months by the Zapatista anti-electoral Other Campaign and its Subcomandante Marcos where the electorate voted most heavily for López Obrador and where the conditions most evidently exist to defend that vote in the streets and on the highways if need be.

The IFE's Foul Play

The malicious behavior by the Federal Electoral Institute and its chairman Luis Carlos Ugalde - in their visible maneuvers partial to Fox's PAN and Calderón throughout the election season and since - was evident prior to the election, but on Sunday night became clear as never before to the Mexican public. On Monday, the bias of the "umpire" became clearer as hundreds of specific examples of fraudulent vote counts began to surface across the Internet. On Tuesday, more so, when Ugalde and IFE were caught red-handed in a big lie: their knowingly false claim that the preliminary results system had tabulated "98.5 percent" of the vote when, in fact, the IFE had hidden 3.3 million (more than seven percent) of the precinct tallies from public view.


Proceso magazine, on Monday, put IFE chief Luis Carlos Ugalde on its cover with the headline "Arbitro Complice" ("Complicit Umpire")
The cauldron that contained the public desire for a democracy long denied began to boil over when the IFE and the two national networks - Televisa and TV Azteca - decided to withhold their exit poll results from the public on Sunday night. This left the IFE's Preliminary Election Results Program (PREP) as the only public source of information. Statisticians and mathematicians are having a field day with the manner in which IFE selectively released results to create a false impression that Calderón was the victor. Some speak of computer-generated fraud and scientific concepts such as "algorithms" that warped IFE's PREP results - your reporter is agnostic, so far, on whether that kind of fraud was committed - but there is one indisputable fact that reveals IFE's one-sided control of the flow of information, and it has nothing to do with fancy scientific concepts. Although IFE's own preliminary numbers today show a difference of only 0.64 percent between PAN and PRD votes, on election night and into Monday IFE selectively rationed the release of partial results to, at each step, portray Calderón as the winner.

The first maneuver was transparent enough: IFE began its online preliminary count on Sunday by selecting result estimates mainly from the Northern Mexican states where Calderón won the vote. This was evident on the IFE PREP results because they were listed state-by-state and also by the five electoral regions of Mexico. Less than an hour after polls closed - at 6:57 p.m. - the earliest IFE results claimed Calderón had 40.87 percent to just 33.69 percent for López Obrador; a difference of more than seven percentage points. But look at this "photograph" of that moment in time.


Graphic: IFE preliminary count at 6:57 p.m. on Sunday. Click for larger version.
"Circunscripción 2," circled in red, represents the northern region of Mexico - where all polls showed to be Calderón's strongest support and López Obrador's weakest - and although it represents only 20 percent of the country's population, IFE led with its numbers as 40 percent of its preliminary vote total. The region is far from IFE headquarters in Mexico City. It is the most geographically disperse region, too, making it a slower process to get the results in to Mexico City. But IFE doubled its statistical influence from this region in the first hour to simulate a false impression that Calderón was far in the lead.

And so it went, all night long. With each and every update, IFE selectively released the vote tallies in a manner that kept Calderón in the lead. This is statistically impossible to do with a final tally of 0.6 percent difference between the two candidates (such a process with a close vote would, if reported as results came in, always show the tally tipping back and forth from one candidate to the other) - unless the results were being rationed selectively. (As example, at noon today, with 25 percent of precinct results tabulated in this very first stage of the recount, López Obrador has 36.98 percent to 34.39 percent for Calderón: the man "in the lead" is likely to tip back and forth all day as occurs in close races. That is what IFE's PREP results would have shown on Sunday night and Monday, had it truly entered the preliminary results randomly as they came in.)

As Sunday night marched into Monday morning, López Obrador closed the gap. Until 70 percent of the preliminary results were tallied, the López Obrador vote rose in a straight and steady line (see red line on chart). But suddenly, with between 70 and 80 percent of the preliminary results tallied, the trajectory that would have put López Obrador in the lead when less than 90 percent of the votes had been counted, took a swift downturn, exactly corresponding to a swift upturn by the third-place candidate Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), represented by the green line on the chart.

Defenders of IFE explain this suspicious turn of events as one of "the rural precincts coming in last," where PRI was expected to do better. But rural district voters constituted the weakest vote for Calderón across the country; he came in a distant third among rural farmers. As the line graph shows, in that latter stage of the posting of PREP results, Calderón's vote trajectory continues to run in the same downward straight line that it had traveled since early in the night. Had these truly been numbers from rural districts, his trajectory (the blue line) would have dipped significantly farther below.

On Monday, IFE closed its preliminary results, claiming that it had counted 98.5 percent of the precincts. With Calderon up by 377,000 votes (about 1.4 percent) it seemed to the casual observer that his lead was insurmountable. The problem is, the IFE did not tell the truth. Only about 92 percent of the preliminary tallies had been included in that count, leaving 3.3 million votes out of the count. The claim - posted with the PREP results - that 98.5 percent had been counted was knowingly false. It was intended, as has every step taken by IFE in the vote counting, to create the false impression of a clear lead by the candidate of the State, Felipe Calderón.

This was a blatant act of tampering with the PREP results by Ugalde and IFE officials. As IFE's own website says: "La alteración de estos resultados es delito federal." That means, "Alteration of these results is a federal crime." The selective withholding of those results on Sunday and since - again, and again, and again - constitutes multiple counts of what ought to be a criminal charge against those IFE officials responsible for withholding the tallies and also for falsely claiming that 98.5 percent had been counted and included in the final PREP tally when they knew it to be false.

The Missing Three Million Votes

When, on Monday, Andrés Manuel López Obrador accused the IFE of hiding 3.3 million votes, Commercial Media pundits and columnists scoffed, accused him of conspiracy theories, and continued their permanent campaign to marginalize him and his supporters.

But by Tuesday afternoon, IFE suddenly "found" 2.5 million of those missing votes.

It is difficult to believe anything IFE or Ugalde say at this point given the documented deceptions they carried out on Sunday and Monday, but even IFE's accounting of those 2.5 million suddenly reappeared votes shows a strong lead by - surprise, surprise - López Obrador:

Obrador (PRD): 888,971
Madrazo (PRI): 809,003
Calderón (PAN): 743,795
Mercado (ASD): 28,040
Campa (NA): 13,096
Write-ins: 15,019
Nullified votes: 82,452

Not counting the "nullified" votes, this narrowed Calderón's purported lead by 145,000 votes; nearly halving his supposed margin to 0.64 percent, or roughly 257,000 votes - less than two votes in each of 130,000 precincts.

As part II of this series will demonstrate, there is a consistent pattern of "vote shaving" against López Obrador between the official voting tallies (known as "actas") in precincts throughout the nation, and the PREP results. Narco News will publish photographs of the official actas and demonstrate how the PREP results published by IFE shaved handfuls of votes from López Obrador's local tallies - sometimes two, or three, or six votes; and frequently simply by chopping off a digit (in one case, for example, changing the PRD candidate's tally from 188 to 88).

There are more missing precincts (with more than 700,000 votes), plus at least 909,000 "nullified" votes that, given IFE's clear bias and unfair handling of the votes, must be reopened to find if there truly were grounds to nullify them.

There is more, so much more, to report. But the facts above alone obligate a full recount, ballot-by-ballot. And it is revealing that Calderón, Fox's PAN and the IFE are stonewalling in opposition to a public recount, while López Obrador and the PRD are insisting on it.

"El que nada debe, nada teme," is a popular Mexican expression: He who owes nothing, fears nothing.

If they are so sure they "won," why do they oppose a full recount?

At stake: criminal penalties for IFE bureaucrats if it is found that ballots were tampered with or "disappeared." That is one fear. The other - justified or not - is who wins the presidency of the Republic of Mexico.

If the IFE tries to rush to judgment and declare a winner prior to a full recount, Mexico will explode. The IFE, the PAN, Fox and Calderón are thus playing with fire.

To be continued...

China's southeastern coastal cities in Fuzhou and Guangdong provinces would be within range of the cruise missile which will be launched from Chiupeng military base in Pingtung county, the website said.

Taiwan has reportedly test-fired cruise missiles in the past although the defence ministry has never confirmed the launches.

The ministry declined to comment on Thursday's report which comes just one day after North Korea test-fired seven missiles, including a long-range Taepodong-2 capable of reaching the United States, sparking international outrage. The missiles splashed down in the Sea of Japan (East Sea).

Taiwan has produced three prototypes of a cruise missile which could be used to strike the east coast of China, Jane's Defence Weekly has said.

In an article in January, the authoritative weekly said Taiwan plans to produce 50 of the missiles called Hsiung Feng 2E (Brave Wind) before 2010 and up to 500 after 2010.

"If deployed on Penghu Island in the south or Tungyin Island in the north, it could strike as far south as Hong Kong and as far north as Shanghai," a source was quoted as saying in the article.

China has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan should it declare formal independence, prompting the island to seek more advanced weaponry to defend itself.

The Pentagon released a report in July last year warning that China had deployed up to 730 ballistic missiles targeting Taiwan. It said Beijing's build-up could tip the military balance against Taiwan and threaten other countries in the region.

Taiwan's military-run Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology, the developer of the cruise missile, is planning to extend its range to 1,000 kilometers, the weekly said.

The Chungshan Institute is also working on a short-range ballistic missile based on the Tien Kung (Sky Bow) air-defence missile system, the weekly said.

The ballistic missile and cruise missile are integral to Taiwan's "active defence" policy, which aims to counter any aggression before it reaches Taiwanese territory, it said.

Relations between China and Taiwan, which split in 1949 at the end of a civil war, have worsened since independence-leaning Chen Shui-bian was elected president in 2000. He was re-elected last year.