BAGHDAD, Iraq - The Iraqi Governing Council today nominated one of its own members, Iyad Allawi, a Shiite Muslim physician who spent years in exile, to become prime minister of the new government to take power June 30, members said.

The chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, was at today's council session and congratulated Allawi on his nomination, said Mustafa al-Marayati, an aide to council member Raja Habib al-Khuzaai.

The council also planned to nominate a president and two vice presidents. But it was not known whether U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has approved the choices.

Brahimi has been leading the process for drawing up the new government, which also includes 26 Cabinet ministers. The final lineup is scheduled to be announced by Monday.

"The whole process is based on guidelines and recommendations made by" Brahimi, said al-Marayati.

Allawi was endorsed unanimously by the council, council member Mahmoud Othman said.

Allawi was formerly secretary-general of the Iraq National Accord, an opposition group made up in part by former military officers who had defected from Saddam Hussein's regime.

He was part of the opposition to the Iraqi regime in the early 1970s and was at the forefront of the exile movement against Saddam.

During his years in exile, Allawi was the little-known favorite of CIA officers wary of dealing with the flashier, better-known exile leader Ahmad Chalabi.

Chalabi, the favorite of the architects of the Iraq invasion at the Pentagon, has fallen out of favor in recent months after his information about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was discredited.

Earlier today, U.S. soldiers escorting a convoy of buses filled with Abu Ghraib prison inmates being released came under attack, but there were no reports of casualties.

The prisoners had just left the Abu Ghraib facility - the center of a scandal involving abuse of detainees by American soldiers - when someone fired shots from buildings near the freeway. The soldiers hunkered down and the convoy of at least 13 buses stopped. The shooting ended quickly.

In Kufa, two Americans were wounded when their Humvee came under small arms fire today, the U.S. military in Baghdad said. There were no further details of the incident, which occurred one day after Shiite leaders announced a deal with radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr to halt the fighting between U.S. troops and the radical militia, the al-Mahdi Army.