BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military said today it would release five Iraqi women detainees, a move demanded by the kidnappers of an American reporter to spare her life, but an official said the release was coincidental.

Meanwhile, a U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded by a roadside bomb blast south of Baghdad on Wednesday, while two Iraqi government employees were gunned down today in separate drive-by attacks in the northern city of Kirkuk.

Trade and Minerals Minister Osama Abdul-Aziz al-Najafi escaped a seventh assassination attempt today after a roadside bomb targeted his convoy north of Baghdad, but three bodyguards were killed and a fourth was seriously wounded, ministry spokeswoman Hanan Jassim said.

The Shiite bloc set to dominate the next parliament, the United Iraqi Alliance, will decide on its nominee for prime minister in the next few days, said a top Shiite official, Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi.

Abdul-Mahdi is among four prominent Shiites mentioned as possible premiers. Others are the current prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari; nuclear physicist Hussain al-Shahrastani; and Nadim al-Jabiri of the Fadhila party, a religious group whose spiritual leader is radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's late father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr.

The Iraqi women will be freed today and Friday as part of a release of 419 Iraqis who officials concluded there was no reason to continue holding, said Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, spokesman for the U.S. detention command.

Rudisill later confirmed that some Iraqis had been released, but he declined to say whether any of the women were among them.

Armed men abducted Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, on Jan. 7 in Baghdad and threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women prisoners were released.

The U.S. military confirmed last week it was holding nine Iraqi women. Today, however, the military said it had detained two more women for alleged insurgent activities in the northern city of Mosul.

Detainees are regularly freed in Iraq following reviews of their cases, a process that can take months, and U.S. officials have said the upcoming releases were part of that routine procedure and not linked to Carroll's case.

A top Iraqi official and the mother of one of the Iraqi female detainees confirmed the imminent releases, saying they were expecting them to occur today.

Busho Ibrahim Ali, the deputy justice minister, said five female detainees were expected to be released from the Camp Cropper detention center on a U.S. base near Baghdad International Airport.

Ali said the women would be brought to the heavily fortified Green Zone, where the Iraqi government and U.S. Embassy are based in Baghdad, and handed over to a senior Sunni Arab political leader before being received by their families.

Detainees usually are transported from detention centers to a Baghdad bus station or to towns near their homes and let go.

Siham Faraj, a mother of 28-year-old Hala Khalid, who was arrested with her brother on Sept. 24 during a dawn raid by U.S. forces on their Baghdad home, said she was waiting anxiously to see her daughter and hoped it would lead to Carroll's safe release.

“We are happy and we thank God for this blessing,” Faraj told The Associated Press. “I call upon the kidnappers of the American reporter to release her because she is as innocent as Hala.

“I wish the Americans would stop random arrests. We only want peace in this country.”

The U.S. soldier who was killed belonged to the Multi-National Division-Baghdad. At least 2,237 members of the U.S. military have died since the war began, according to an Associated Press count.

In Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, gunmen assassinated a senior official of Iraq's anti-corruption commission and the deputy director of a state-run food stuff company in separate attacks Thursday, police Capt. Farhad Talabani said.

Anti-corruption official Othman Majeed Rasheed, a 51-year-old Turkoman, was walking from his home to his nearby office when he was killed by a hail of gunfire, Talabani said.

Shortly after, the same group of gunmen shot dead Jomaa Rasheed, a Kurd who is the deputy director of the state-run company for food stuffs, in the same area, Talabani said. The two victims were unrelated.

Police believe the men were killed by the same masked gunmen who launched similar attacks on Jan. 17, targeting another Kirkuk office of the anti-corruption watchdog, known as the Integrity Commission, and offices for the Kurdistan Peoples Party, killing two people and wounding three.

Gunmen disguised as Iraqi soldiers kidnapped Hadi al-Dahlaki, owner of a food company, and killed his son Wednesday during a raid on their factory in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, Diyala police said. The al-Dahlaki family is one of Baqouba's wealthiest, and several of the hostage's sons have been kidnapped and released previously after the paying of ransoms.