Wrangling over the makeup of a government that will be representative of all religious groups and political trends has delayed for months the formation of a new government following the successful Dec. 15 legislative elections, which saw a record turnout among Sunni Arabs that form the heart of the insurgency.

The Shiite Fadhila party withdrew from negotiations and removed the support of its 15 deputies for the 130-strong United Iraqi Alliance last Friday after complaining, in part, over al-Maliki's failure to give it the country's top oil post, which it held under outgoing Shiite Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

Al-Maliki said "Fadhila is part of the Alliance. If there is a dispute over ministerial posts, it can be resolved through dialogue."

Fadhila spokesman Sheik Sabah al-Saedi said earlier that the party's 15 legislators in the 275-member parliament would form an opposition bloc. He denied the oil portfolio was behind the decision to withdraw.

"The main reason behind our withdrawal from the new government is that we do believe that Iraq needs a strong and competent government that is able to consider the national interests rather than narrow ones," al-Saedi told AP Television News.

Although Fadhila has relatively few seats in parliament, it controls the provincial government in Basra, the country's second largest city and the center of the vast southern oil fields.

On Saturday, police found the bodies of Ahmed Midhat al-Mahmoud, 22, a lawyer, and two of his bodyguards in northern Baghdad's Azamiyah district, said Hasan Sabri, the head of the local council, and Iraq's deputy justice minister, Busho Ibrahim Ali.

The killings came five months after the judge, Midhat al-Mahmoud, survived a suicide bomb attack against his home.

Ahmed Midhat al-Mahmoud's father heads the Supreme Judicial Council, which swears in all judges and parliament, among other responsibilities.

The al-Mahmoud family is Shiite and the three bodies were found dumped onto a street in the mostly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Azamiyah, Sabri and Ali said.

The killings were the latest carried out against government officials or their families. They could also be part of a series of killings carried out by death squads and militias, who have kidnapped and killed hundreds of Sunnis and Shiites ¡ª often motivated by sectarian hatred.

Elsewhere, a U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb south of Baghdad, the military said. The attack raised to at least 2,437 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Five Iraqis also were killed in drive-by shootings Saturday, including a tribal sheik, officials said.

Separately, a roadside bomb exploded near the home of a former army lieutenant colonel in the village of Balad Ruz, 15 miles east of Baqouba, authorities said. Lt. Col. Hussein Shams was seriously wounded, and an Iraqi army patrol rushing to the scene was hit by a second roadside bomb, wounding an officer and a soldier, the Joint Coordination Center said.