Tortured bodies of 11 Sunni Arabs found in Baghdad:

Meanwhile, a Sunni Muslim religious official said the tortured bodies of 11 Sunni Arabs, who had been killed execution-style with a bullet to the head, were found in Baghdad Tuesday after having been arrested by police commandos two days earlier.

The latest twist in growing tensions between Sunnis and the majority Shiite community comes as the top US general announced that a key aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leading Al-Qaeda operative in Iraq and a fanatic anti-Shiite, has been captured by US forces.

The Sunnis, including an imam prayer leader, were arrested in a police commando raid at their homes in northern Baghdad early Sunday, said the official of the Waqf religious organisation who did not want to be identified.

Their bodies were found dumped in the north of the city on Tuesday, he added and "all bore torture marks and bullet wounds to the back of the head."

Hussein Ali Kamal, deputy minister for intelligence at the interior ministry, told AFP it was not known who was responsible for the killings.

"The minister has issued orders that nobody be arrested without a warrant," he said.

"Every day we find innocent people killed and their bodies dumped in the streets. We don't know who's responsible. The minister has ordered that a special committee be set up to look into this very explosive issue.

"There are people who dress up in police or commandos uniforms to carry out, even at night, horrible attacks which are then blamed on police," he said.

The head of the Waqf, Adnan al-Dulaimi, called Wednesday for an official investigation into the case and asked that its results be made public.

"This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened," Dulaimi said in a statement. "We want to know who is responsible for such horrible crimes."

There have been numerous allegations of mistreatment and killings of Sunnis by special police forces over the past few months.

Sunni Arabs, dominant under the regime of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, are believed to provide the backbone to the current insurgency.

In Washington, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said a key aide to Zarqawi had been captured in what he described late Tuesday as a "pretty good success."

But General Richard Myers acknowledged that coalition troops in Iraq faced "a very dangerous insurgency" that is far from being on its death bed.

"Just yesterday on the battlefield, we picked up Zarqawi's main leader in Baghdad. They call him the Emir of Baghdad, Abu Abd al-Aziz, and that's going to hurt that operation of Zarqawi's pretty significantly," Myers said.

In other incidents Wednesday, two police were killed and six people wounded, including three police, in various attacks in and north of the capital.

Meanwhile, the Australian government announced that it will deploy about 150 elite troops to Afghanistan to fight a resurgence in rebel attacks but has no plans to send more soldiers to Iraq, where 900 are currently stationed.

And in Washington, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday he had not seen a British Ministry of Defense report on a major US-British troop reduction in Iraq in 2006, but the projected figures seemed "plausible."

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