Halabja, Iraq ? Standing near rows of white grave markers, Secretary of State Colin Powell on Monday honored 5,000 Iraqi Kurds who died in a chemical weapons attack and pledged such brutality was gone along with Saddam Hussein.

With relatives of victims standing before him, Powell said: “I can’t tell you that Saddam Hussein was a murderous tyrant — you know that. What I can tell you is that what happened here in 1988 is never going to happen again.”

Powell added that Saddam was “running and hiding. He’s going to be running until we catch him or he dies.”

After Powell dedicated a memorial and museum to commemorate the victims, women wearing black thrust bouquets of flowers toward him. Many in the audience wept, holding pictures of family members killed in Halabja.

The massacre on March 15, 1988, in this northeastern Iraqi city, seven miles from the Iranian border, has been cited repeatedly by President Bush as evidence of Saddam’s brutality. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited the site of another mass grave this month, in Mahaweel, where lie bodies of an estimated 3,100 Shiite Muslims, killed as Saddam’s forces smashed a rebellion after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Saddam’s government killed an estimated 300,000 Iraqis, said Sandy Hodgkinson, the top human rights official in the U.S.-led civilian administration. As many as 500 mass graves are spread across Iraq, and coalition authorities have received formal reports of 151 sites, Hodgkinson said.

Police chief killed

Powell’s visit did not quell further violence in Iraq. Three assailants in red-and-white Arab headdresses gunned down the police chief of a city west of Baghdad on Monday in an ambush that underscored the perils for Iraqis who join U.S.-backed security forces.

The motive for the slaying of Khaldiya’s police chief, Col. Khedeir Mekhalef Ali, was not immediately clear.

“The three attackers opened fire with machine guns, shot one of the tires of the chief’s car and then approached the vehicle and shot him at least 25 times,” said his driver, 47-year-old Rabia’a Kamash, being treated at Fallujah General Hospital.

Khaldiya and Fallujah, on the main highway to the Jordanian border, are the heart of the “Sunni Triangle,” a broad swath of Iraq north and west of Baghdad where support for Saddam Hussein remains strong and guerrilla warfare against the American occupation is heaviest.

The Sunni Triangle also includes Baghdad, where a 1st Armored Division soldier died of his wounds in a military field hospital Monday after an attack on his patrol. He was the 156th American to die in Iraq since President Bush declared an end to major combat May 1.