The United Nations said it would temporarily pull its foreign staff out of Baghdad as US forces hunted a top former official under Saddam Hussein suspected of coordinating resistance attacks. The UN announcement followed a similar one by the International Red Cross (ICRC), which said it was slashing foreign staff in Iraq after a truck bomb killed two of its employees and devastated its Baghdad offices on Monday. The decision only affected international workers in the Iraqi capital and not those in the northern city of Arbil, Heuze added. The ICRC also said its expatriate staff were headed out of Iraq to discuss the details of the scaledown ordered by the agency following Monday's bomb. "All expatriates will leave Iraq today or tomorrow to meet for a few days in a neighbouring country with directors from Geneva," ICRC spokeswoman Nada Doumani said in Baghdad. Doumani said the review of staffing levels would last less than a week but declined to say where it would be held. The ICRC pullout appeared to be deeply troubling to the United States, which appealed directly to the chief of the agency not to pull foreign staff out in the wake of Monday's bombing. That blast was one of a series of almost simultaneous car bomb attacks around Baghdad that killed 43 people and wounded more than 200. Meanwhile, in Washington a US defence official said a former Iraqi general, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who was the prime mover behind the ousted regime is believed to be coordinating attacks in Iraq by foreign fighters and Saddam loyalists. The Iraqi resistance continued Thursday, with an abortive grenade attack on a Baghdad police station and a Polish military convoy coming under fire south of the capital. The Poles were subject to mortar fire from unidentified attackers in Karbala, but there were no casualties, a spokesman for the Polish military, Andrzej Wiatrowski, said in Warsaw. Back in Baghdad, at least one person was killed and eight wounded when a fire broke out Thursday night in two buildings in a commercial area of central Baghdad after a propane tank exploded. As firefighters battled the blaze, another loud explosion shook the capital, when an explosive device blew up as a US military convoy was driving by, damaging a humvee military vehicle, an Iraqi policeman said. Meanwhile, speaking from their hospital beds, three people in the northern city of Baqubah said they had been wounded by mortar rounds the previous night. In Baghdad, Iraqi police said they foiled a hand-grenade attack on their station, a few hundred metres (yards) from the US-led coalition's headquarters. And in the northern oil-rich province of Kirkuk, a civilian was seriously wounded when an explosive device blew up as he was driving along a road regularly used by US troops, police said. In Mosul, witnesses said an explosive charge detonated on the path of a US army convoy, but there were no casualties, while a police station in the area was targeted by assault-rifle fire. **PHOTO CAPTION*** An Iraqi man sits handcuffed and with a bag over his head after was detained by occupation troops during a pre-dawn raid in downtown Tikrit. (AFP/Roberto Schmidt)