And as the death toll from Wednesday's blast outside a revered Shia shrine rose to 10, fanning fears of sectarian violence ahead of the January 30 elections, a top telecoms official was gunned down in Baghdad.
"We will continue to make it clear, to both Syria and Iran, that... meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq is not in their interest," Bush said.
His comments came after Iraq's defense minister Hazem Shaalan accused those two countries of orchestrating terrorist attacks, branding Tehran in particular the "most dangerous enemy of Iraq".
Iraqi authorities and US-led forces are struggling to wipe out Iraq's deadly insurgency ahead of the first multiparty polls in the country in half a century.
A bomb blast outside one of Shia Islam's holiest shrines in the central city of Karbala killed at least 10 people and wounded 40, medics said, in an apparent attempt to fan intercommunal tensions.
Sheikh Abdel Mehdi Karbalai, the local representative of Shia spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, was among those wounded in the bombing outside the Imam Hussein mausoleum, a senior medic said.
And armed men killed the director of Iraq's state-run telecommunications company and a bodyguard as they were leaving his home in Baghdad, the telecommunications ministry said.
Senior officials working for the Iraqi interim government and members of the country's fledgling security forces have been the target of relentless attacks by insurgents.
Two national guards and a police captain were reported killed in separate rebel attacks north of the capital in Baquba and Mosul on Wednesday, and another policeman killed in a bomb attack near Tikrit on Thursday.
National guards opened fire on a driver whose car accelerated toward their patrol in Samarra, killing the driver, while three rebels were reportedly killed after they attacked a police convoy in Ramadi, west of Baghdad.
The pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al Awsat announced the temporary closure of its Baghdad office after receiving threats against journalists from an armed group.
In Fallujah the US military said that continued fighting with rebels in the battle-scarred city was preventing its inhabitants from returning home, more than a month after a massive US-led assault began there.
A total of some 6,400 candidates on around 100 lists have been registered for the historic vote, according to final figures released on Thursday.
Campaigning officially kicked off as the US-backed interim government announced it would begin trials of top officials of Saddam Hussein's ousted regime as early as next week.
Investigative hearings into the cases are also due to begin, the tribunal said on Thursday, without specifying a timetable.
Saddam will be the last to go on trial, "long after" the elections, justice minister Malek Dohan Al Hassan told a Swiss newspaper in an article published on Thursday.
The huge array of election lists did little to assuage fears of a massive boycott in Sunni Arab areas where support for anti-US insurgents runs strong.
Sunnis are fearful that the Shias' demographic weight will leave them dominant in the new assembly, which is to draft a permanent post-Saddam constitution and oversee a new government to replace the interim lineup installed by the US-led coalition.
Italy's foreign ministry said an Italian national may have been kidnapped in Iraq and killed, but there was no confirmation.
An Iraqi photographer said insurgents had shown him an unidentified man's body in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, and an Italian's passport.
The Italian embassy in Baghdad refused to comment on the report.
© 2004 Agence France-Presse
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