IRAQ - Apr 20 - Mortar Fire Kill 22.

A deadly mortar barrage on a US-run prison in Baghdad kill 22 prisoners and wound more than 90. All of the casualties at the Abu Ghraib jail just west of Baghdad were among the 4,400 people detained there on security grounds. Insurgents also attacked a US military convoy in the northern city of Mosul and one US soldier died of his wounds; 4 others were injured. Elsewhere, tension eased in 2 cities as a truce held in the Sunni bastion of Falluja and US forces prepared to pull back from a forward base near Najaf, where rebel Shiite theologian Muqtada Al Sadr has taken refuge. Witnesses said civilians, who had fled battles between US Marines and Sunni insurgents, trickled back to Falluja on foot though vehicles were turned back at checkpoints. Some stores reopened and some Iraqi police returned to duty, but there was no sign of US forces in central parts of the city. Thousands of Iraqis had left Falluja, 30 miles west of Baghdad, to escape fierce fighting in which hundreds of civilians and dozens of Marines were killed this month. The returnees ventured back a day after the US military said it would not resume offensive operations in Falluja on condition rebels gave up their heavy weapons. "I am confident that the guerrillas will turn in their heavy weapons as long as the US provide the guarantees they promised", says Fawzi Muthin, a 47-year-old engineer who was a member of Falluja's delegation in the talks. US Marines launched a crackdown in Falluja on April 5 after crowds burned and mutilated the corpses of 4 US private security guards ambushed on March 31. The fighting left the city of 300,000 people littered with burned-out cars, pock-marked walls, charred houses and a sports ground turned into an emergency cemetery. Many of the graves are still unnamed. "Unknown, died in Al Khadra mosque", reads an inscription scrawled in paint on a stone on a sandy mound marking one grave. "Three children", says another.