TRAINED TERRORISTS

More on those who may be behind the Embassy bombing.

BAGHDAD - The U.S. administration in Iraq has received intelligence reports that hundreds of Islamic militants who fled Iraq during the war have returned and are planning major terrorist attacks.

L. Paul Bremer, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, said in an interview Friday that fighters from Ansar al-Islam, a militant organization the United States had sought to destroy during the war, had escaped to Iran and then slipped back across the border into Iraq.

"The intelligence suggests that Ansar al-Islam is planning large-scale terrorist attacks," he said.

"We have seen here a new technique for Iraq that we have never seen before," Bremer said, referring to the car bomb that ripped the Jordanian Embassy in central Baghdad, killing 17 people and wounding scores more.

"My initial instinct was to believe that this had to be done from somebody from outside," he said. "But I have been told . . . that there was part of the Mukhabarat (the Iraqi intelligence service) that specialized in sophisticated bombing and it is possible that this kind of technique did exist."