BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 5 — The visit here this week by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her British counterpart, Jack Straw, only served to stiffen the resolve of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to retain his post, prolonging a deadlock in the formation of a new government, a top aide to Mr. Jaafari said today.
The aide, Haider al-Abadi, said the visit was ill-timed, counterproductive and what he called "naked intervention."
"Pressure from outside is not helping to speed up any solution," he said. "All it's doing is hardening the position of people who are supporting Jaafari."
He added, "They shouldn't have come to Baghdad."
His comments were echoed by other leaders across the political spectrum today, including Kurds and Sunni Arabs.
"They complicated the thing, and now it's more difficult to solve," said Mahmoud Osman, an independent member of the Kurdistan Alliance, speaking of Ms. Rice and Mr. Straw. "They shouldn't have come and they shouldn't have interfered."
By winning the most votes in December's election, the main Shiite political bloc earned the right to choose the country's next prime minister. Mr. Jaafari won the nomination in a close internal ballot but has faced a fierce campaign by a coalition of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and independents — joined more recently by some Shiite leaders — to step down.
The Bush administration has not concealed its disapproval of Mr. Jaafari and the visit by Ms. Rice and Mr. Straw was widely viewed here as an attempt to ratchet up the pressure against him to relinquish the nomination.
But according to several political leaders interviewed today, the trip appeared to have the opposite effect.
"I think it hardened the position of Jaafari" and his allies, most notably the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, said Saleh Mutlak, a hard-line Sunni Arab.
Mr. Mutlak, in a telephone interview, said the diplomats' trip was little more than a dramatic photo opportunity in response to waning support in the United States and Britain for the war. If they wanted to pressure the prime minister, he said, "they could have done this without coming here," and done it more effectively and more subtly through Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.
Efforts to break the logjam continued today as President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, sounded out other political leaders on the possibility of taking the issue before Parliament, a Kurdish official said. But some Shiite leaders have promised to resist that move because it is not prescribed in the Iraqi constitution.
Nearly four months after elections, the country is still being led by a caretaker government, and violence has flourished in the political vacuum. The American and Iraqi military commands have been trying to counter shifts in the conflict that have resulted in skyrocketing civilian casualties inflicted by both Sunni Arab insurgents and sectarian death squads.
In Baghdad, two car bombs detonated this afternoon within about 20 minutes of each other, killing three people and wounding at least 16, an official at the Interior Ministry said.
Gunmen wearing the uniforms of Interior Ministry commandos and driving ministry vehicles opened fire on guards outside the Baghdad headquarters of the Iraqna cellular phone company, wounding a guard then abducting him, the ministry official source said.
The security forces belonging to the Interior Ministry are heavily infiltrated by members of Shiite militias and have been accused of committing crimes. Top ministry officials did not comment on today's assault but have in the past blamed such crimes on criminals using false or stolen ministry uniforms and vehicles.
An Iraqi cameraman for CBS News, who was detained a year ago on suspicions of abetting the insurgency, was acquitted today by a three-judge panel at the Central Criminal Court of Iraq here.
On April 5, 2005, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein was shot in the hip by an American sniper while he was filming the wreckage of a car bomb that had wounded several American soldiers. He was taken to a hospital where he was detained by the Americans. They said that he had tested positive for explosives and that footage on his camera linked him to the insurgents.
After a yearlong journey through the detention system, his ordeal came to an end just as suddenly as it had begun. At his trial, a prosecutor stood up in a half-lit courtroom at the Central Criminal Court and, in a statement that lasted less than one minute and was delivered in a phlegmatic monotone, requested that the case be dismissed for lack of evidence.
After a brief recess, the judge declared Mr. Hussein not guilty. Mr. Hussein, wearing a prison-issue canary-yellow jumpsuit, fell to his knees, dropped his forehead to the ground and prayed in silence. He was returned to Abu Ghraib where he would await final approval of his release by the American military, his lawyers said.
"The mystery is why this case got referred to the court in the first place," Scott Horton, a lawyer from New York who flew to Baghdad to help defend Mr. Hussein, said after the ruling. "It's intimidation and the potential use of lethal force against journalists. This case was brought to fire a shot across the bow of a free press."
The American military did not respond to requests for comment.
Free-press advocates have pointed to the case of the CBS cameraman as an example of the unique difficulties that Iraqi reporters face in covering the war, particularly the American military. While Western reporters are largely confined to fortified compounds and military bases, their Iraqi employees are often left to cover much of the day-to-day violence in urban Iraq.
Dozens of Iraqi journalist working for Western news organizations have been detained while on assignment and sometimes released weeks or months later with no explanation.
Last month, the American commander in charge of detainee operations in Iraq told Reuters that the military would accelerate the cases of detained journalists in which a news organizations could vouch for the journalist. The commander, Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, also said troops would be given more training to help them identify and protect to journalists in a war zone.