Give Robert Downey Jr. a glass of scotch and a suit made of metal, and lines will form around the block. But cast him as a newspaper columnist who befriends a cello-playing homeless man, and these days the only crowds gathering will be for the movie playing next door.

“The Soloist,” a drama starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr., did poorly at the box office.

The latter Downey project, a onetime best picture hopeful called “The Soloist,” cost $50 million to produce and has grossed just $30 million. Reviews were less than rapturous, but producer Gary Foster thinks there was something deeper at play.

“Audiences don’t want to be reminded of the darkness in the world,” he says. “They want to laugh, get taken to space, watch things in a museum come to life.”

But what if your idea of entertainment involves more than watching Ben Stiller get slapped by monkeys? The pickings are slim and getting slimmer.

In the wake of high-profile dramas flopping at the box office — including “Frost/Nixon,” “Australia,” “Revolutionary Road,” and “State of Play” — studios are increasingly gun-shy about making movies that don’t offer pure escapism. Even the frothy, adult-oriented caper “Duplicity” struggled to find a wide audience.

One producer who specializes in dramas says the climate is as brutal as he’s ever seen it: “Anything that can’t be sold as a genre film or wasn’t conceived as a franchise is dead.”

Even projects that might once have been considered Oscar bait have fallen prey to executives’ squeamishness. Paramount turned down director Bill Condon’s planned biopic about Richard Pryor, with Eddie Murphy attached to star. Universal axed a drama starring Naomi Watts about a global activist.

“With the economy being what it is, no one wants to get blamed for a failure,” says one agent. “If you greenlight something that’s [totally mainstream] and it fails, it’s not your fault. If you greenlight an adult drama and it tanks, you lose your job.”

Who’s to blame for the sorry state of the adult drama?

Filmmakers fault studio marketers for not effectively selling serious fare. Producers blame the studios for making poor choices and spending too much money, setting dramas up for failure. Meanwhile, some executives say the films themselves simply aren’t compelling enough.

“Frankly, a lot of the dramas just aren’t as good as they purport to be,” says one studio exec. To break through these days, a dramatic film needs to have more than simply an Oscar winner or two and a worthwhile tale to tell. “The adult drama today has to be more than, say, a meditation on alcoholism,” says Roberto Orci, co-writer and executive producer of “Star Trek,” who’s trying to get his own drama, 28th Amendment, off the ground at Warner Bros. “You have to tell that story in a new way.”

It also helps if you can give your drama the commercial hook of a genre film — like last year’s hit “Gran Torino,” a meditation on tolerance wrapped in the guise of a movie with a gun-toting Clint Eastwood and a cool car.

“That movie worked because you could put a 30-second spot together where people said, ‘Oh, that sounds kick-ass,’ ” says Foster.

Universal seems to be following a similar playbook for its July release “Public Enemies.” The studio’s great, heart-thumping trailer suggests an action movie more than a character-driven historical drama. Likewise, judging from the pulse-pounding ads for The Weinstein Company’s post-apocalyptic drama “The Road,” you’d think the film was “The Road Warrior,” not a somber tale of societal breakdown.

As bleak as things look for the adult drama, many believe the genre is simply in the midst of a cyclical downturn, and that it will eventually make a comeback.

“People are turned off to stuff that’s holding a mirror up to their lives,” says one prominent producer. “But that will all change when we return to a more solid economic footing.”

Producer Mark Johnson (”The Notebook”) agrees. “You have to have faith in a mature audience,” he says. “The strike zone may be getting smaller and smaller, but if you throw it right, it can still work.”

He’d better hope so. His child-with-cancer weeper “My Sister’s Keeper” opens June 26 — just two days after a little robot drama called “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”

If you like to search for “music lyrics” or “free” things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And “free music downloads” puts 20 percent of Web surfers in harm’s way of malicious software, known as “malware.”

Searches that use “free,” “music” and “download” are at increased risk of malicious software.

A new research report by U.S.-based antivirus software company McAfee has identified the most dangerous Internet search words that places users on pages with a higher likelihood of malware.

The study examined 2,600 popular keywords on five major search engines — Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask — and analyzed 413,000 Web pages.

“Just in the past year, we’ve seen a pretty dramatic shift in what we call malware,” David DeWalt, president and CEO of McAfee, told Richard Quest for CNN’s Quest Means Business. 

“It went from a hacker in a basement, to organized cybercrime to now, literally, terrorism and other forms of organized geopolitical attacks,” he said.

Categories that had the highest risk of run-ins with malware: screen savers, free games, work from home, Olympics, videos, celebrities, music and news.

Riskiest terms: word unscrambler, lyrics, myspace, free music downloads, phelps, game cheats, printable fill-in puzzles, free ringtones and solitaire.

The study shows how cyber criminals are increasing in sophistication.

“We can have massive outages with a hacker in the basement. We saw that recently with the ‘Twitter worm,’ a 17-year-old in his basement basically perpetrated tens of millions of (computer) outages. Or, we can see an organized attack bringing down infrastructure,” DeWalt said.

Antivirus software companies lag behind latest developments by cyber criminals. “We’ve been way behind, that’s true for the entire world, the global infrastructure of the Internet has grown dramatically — 50 percent of the world’s PCs are unprotected,” he said.

Despite the increased risk, DeWalt doesn’t believe there will be a “cyber Armageddon” causing widespread destruction of computers and Internet infrastructure.

“Last week, you saw President Obama in the United States talk about a major cyber-security initiative sponsored by the government, other governments are sponsoring this as well,” DeWalt said. “I think we’re learning this can happen, and if we get ahead of it, we can prevent it.”

Hopes for a China-led recovery to the world economy got a reality check Thursday, as government data showed the country’s exports in May fell a record 26.4 percent compared to last year.

China’s $586 billion stimulus package includes a focus on increasing infrastructure.

With recent disappointing trade figures from South Korea, Taiwan and Germany, the numbers out of China suggests no light yet in sight at the end of the recessionary tunnel.

“We see evidence globally that productivity has slowed again,” says Frederic Neumann, senior economist at HSBC in Hong Kong. “You look month-on-month, it’s all very disappointing readings … it was not the big bounce that people are looking for.”

The drop in China was the largest ever year-on-year drop of exports, larger than April’s 22.6 percent drop and worse than analysts predicted. Imports to China dropped 25.2 percent last month, compared to 23 percent in April.

China has the second largest export economy in the world, next to Germany. Industrial orders in Germany fell a record 28.7 percent year-on-year in April.

The fall was the seventh straight month of decline in China’s once bustling export business, which has fueled the nation’s nearly 10 percent annual growth for the past decade and ascent to the world’s third largest economy.

But that came to an end after the September fall of Lehman Brothers. The spiraling impact of the financial crisis dialed down the spigot of orders from trading partners in the United States and Europe.

The nation’s first quarter gross domestic product grew 6.1 percent, the government announced Thursday — down from 10.6 percent a year ago.

Meanwhile, urban fixed asset investment in China was up nearly 33 percent the first five months of this year compared to last year. China’s $586 billion stimulus package includes a focus on increasing infrastructure as a way to spur domestic demand to offset export losses.

“These two data surprises out of China — exports worse than expected, fixed asset investment better than expected — neatly summarizes the whole picture,” Neumann said. “It shows that pump priming by the government is working and highlights the importance of continued pump priming.

“It highlights that trade risks remain. If there is no support in the private sector (for trade) that raises concerns that pump priming by the government won’t be sustainable,” Neumann said.

Meanwhile, in “less worse” economic news, revised data from Japan showed its year-on-year GDP decline from January to March was 14.2 percent rather than the 15.2 percent the government previously reported. Still, the decline was a record drop.

The Nikkei 225 Stock Average in Tokyo briefly broke 10,000 this morning for the first time in eight months. The Tokyo bourse hit a 26-year record low in March.

A hundred years ago a Brazilian physician, Carlos Chagas, showed that monkeys were susceptible to a rare parasitic illness carried by a particular Latin American bug.

A mother and baby visit a clinic in Bolivia to get tested for Chagas.

Today an estimated 16 to 18 million people are infected with Chagas, as the disease is now known, and it claims some 50,000 lives each year. Yet most people have never heard of it.

Chagas disease is exclusive to Latin America, and kills more people there than any other parasitic illness, including malaria.

In Bolivia, an estimated one in five people are infected. So why is so little known about the disease?

One crucial reason is that it only affects the poor.

In the mud and thatch homes of rural villages and urban slums, bugs known locally as vinchuca, make their home in cracks in the walls and holes in the roofs. The bugs carry the parasite that causes chagas, in their saliva and their feces.

Infection occurs when they bite, or if their are unknowingly eaten in uncooked food, or rubbed in the eye.

Infected women can transfer chagas to their child during pregnancy, delivery or while breastfeeding.

In its early stages, Chagas it is eminently treatable, but there are many problems.

“Most people don’t know they’ve been infected,” says Dr. Tom Ellman, who works in Bolivia with humanitarian agency, Doctors Without Borders.

He told CNN: “Many of them will drop down dead usually from heart problems cause by the disease 10, 20, 30 years after they’ve been infected and no one will know why.”

For Dr. Ellman, this lack of effective treatment is a symptom of a much sadder cause.

“In terms of getting better treatment, you’re not going to have the interest of pharmaceutical companies, who will only investigate new drugs if there is a market that is willing to buy them.

“What we need now is more interest. We’re still using drugs invented over forty years ago, that have huge numbers of side effects and take sixty or ninety days to work,” he told CNN.

Even after these extensive courses of anti-parasitic drugs, there is no definitive test to see if the patient has been cured. Doctors can only advise patients to return in two years.

Dr. Ellman also has particular concerns for children over the unavailability of new drugs: “At the moment we have to cut adult doses of tablets into much smaller sizes for children which brings pricks of getting the dosage wrong and makes it much more complicated.”

Chagas can be detected via blood test. In the clinics where Doctors Without Borders work, they advise parents to have themselves and their children tested whenever they visit a clinic.

But the challenge they face is vast. How to make a population wise to the threat of a disease that is already plaguing them, and that many have still never heard of.

The World Health Organization scheduled an emergency meeting for Thursday to decide whether to declare a global swine flu pandemic as confirmed cases of H1N1 virus continue to soar worldwide.

Kindergarten students, some wearing masks, at school in a residential estate in Hong Kong Thursday.

By early Thursday morning, the U.N. health agency had recorded more than 27,700 cases in 74 countries, with 141 deaths.

Also Thursday, authorities in Hong Kong ordered the closure of all elementary schools, kindergartens and day-care centers in the city after 12 students were found to be infected with the virus.

Authorities have not determined the source of the infection, said Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Donald Tsang. This makes it the first cluster of swine flu cases in the city without a link to someone who had traveled overseas.

The number of cases continue to grow in Britain, Japan and Australia — all of them outside the Americas where the virus was first detected in April.

If the WHO declares a pandemic Thursday, it will be the first flu pandemic in 41 years.

“We know that the virus is spreading and we are now seeing that activity is picking up in a number of countries and this is, as I had mentioned before last week, we know that we are getting closer to probably a pandemic situation,” Keiji Fukuda, the agency’s assistant director-general of health security and environment, told reporters Tuesday.

The Geneva-based United Nations health agency is working to prepare governments first to prevent an overreaction if WHO’s six-step pandemic scale is raised to its highest level, he said.

“What this would mean is that spread of the virus has continued and that activity has become established in at least two regions of the world,” he said. “It does not mean that the severity of the situation has increased and that people are getting seriously sick at higher numbers or higher rates than they are right now. This is a very important point for countries to understand.”

The schools and day-care centers in Hong Kong were told to close for 14 days as investigators tried to identify the source of the infection, said Tsang, the chief executive.

The health department will decide after two weeks whether or not to continue the shut-down.

A month ago, Hong Kong quarantined about 300 hotel guests for a week after the first case of the virus was confirmed there.

Hong Kong’s abundance of caution stems from the government’s unwillingness to see a repeat of the SARS epidemic in 2004 that killed nearly 300 people.

Also on Thursday, Israel’s health ministry announced that the number of people diagnosed with swine flu was 68.

Health officials have begun using the virus’ clinical name — H1N1 — to reflect that it’s actually a combination of several different types of flu and to reduce confusion about whether eating pork can spread the virus. It cannot.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad further fueled the unprecedented drama in Iranian politics ahead of Friday’s national elections, giving a fiery response Wednesday to harsh criticism from one of the country’s top politicians and other critics.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who came to power in 2005, is seeking a second term in office.

“They created an atmosphere in this country to make people think as though nothing was done,” Ahmadinejad said of his critics in a televised address. “I am going to say, ‘You lie, you lie.’”

“Our work is in front of people’s eyes,” the president added, ticking off a lengthy list of accomplishments he says were made during his administration.

Ahmadinejad has publicly engaged in a heated back-and-forth with former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who accused the current president of “lies and distortions.”

Responding to the president’s verbal attacks during a presidential debate last week, Rafsanjani said Ahmadinejad’s “baseless and irresponsible” statements brought back “bitter memories” of anti-revolutionary groups in the aftermath of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

In the debate with his chief rival Mir Hossein Moussavi, Ahmadinejad accused Rafsanjani and another former president, Mohammad Khatami, of mismanagement, corruption and masterminding a plot against him.

The sparring continued as Rafsanjani drafted an open letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, stating that “millions of people were witness to [Ahmadinejad's] lies and distortions of the truth, which were against religion, law, ethics and fairness and were aimed at the achievements of our Islamic System.”

Rafsanjani, a powerful cleric who heads the Expediency Council and Assembly of Experts, was president of Iran from 1989 to 1997. He ran again in 2005, positioning himself in the political center, but lost to Ahmadinejad, then the ultra-conservative mayor of Tehran.

In his letter Tuesday, published by the Iranian Labor News Agency, Rafsanjani urged Khamenei to take control and “put out this fire” in the interest of national strength and unity.

It is rare for Iran’s political leaders to publicly attack each other.

But the elections this year have taken an energetic turn. Last week, Iranians watched a series of live televised presidential debates.

This week, political rallies jammed the streets of Tehran, just days before the Islamic republic decides on its next president.

Moussavi, the reformist candidate, has rallied Iran’s younger voters, many of whom want Ahmadinejad out of office.

Moussavi’s supporters organized a human chain stretching north to south through the capital city. When one of Ahmadinejad’s supporters strayed into an opposition stronghold, the mood was raucous but not violent as the two camps tried to drown each other out.

Denzel Washington’s new movie, “The Taking of Pelham 123,” is not a remake, even though Walter Matthau starred in a film by the same name in 1974, the actor told CNN.

Denzel Washington plays a transit official, once demoted, in “The Taking of Pelham 123.”

Moreover, Washington’s character is not like the hostage negotiator he played three years ago in “Inside Man,” although the movie is about his negotiation with a deranged ex-con hostage-holder, played by John Travolta, Washington said.

And he’s right.

The updated “The Taking of Pelham 123″ is a riveting movie about a subway dispatcher confronted by a former Wall Street trader seeking revenge — not just a ransom, as in the 1974 film — from the city of New York for sending him to prison.

The movie opens nationwide Friday.

It’s essentially a two-character play, with much of the dialogue delivered over a two-way radio between Washington, in the train control center, and Travolta, on a hijacked train, director Tony Scott said.

The drama is paced and punctuated by a dramatic above-ground sequence, including plenty of crashes, as police rush to deliver a $10 million cash ransom before a deadline.

Travolta’s character is “a contradiction of what you normally expect in a bad guy,” Scott said. “He’s funny, he’s smart, and he’s got a big heart.”

While Travolta, who is mourning the loss of his teenage son earlier this year, did not participate in interviews, he issued a written statement that called his character “the ultimate evil mastermind.”

“This role as an actor gave me the chance to dispense with all moral and ethical limitations, and explore just how bad this character could really be,” Travolta said.

Washington said his character, a transit official demoted to dispatcher because he was suspected of taking a bribe, is a new twist on the familiar hostage negotiator role.

“I was concerned a little bit about ‘Inside Man’ where I was a cop and a hostage negotiator,” he said. “I just liked the idea when they hand him a gun that he’d never held one before, that he was an ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation and with this cloud over his head. He didn’t come to work knowing he was going to get an opportunity to redeem himself.”

Washington, who looks younger and more fit than his character, said to prepare for the role he “ate a lot and kept getting smaller and smaller sweaters to wear.”

James Gandolfini’s role as New York’s mayor is a combination of current and former mayors — Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani. While he has Bloomberg’s Wall Street savvy, he carries himself like Guiliani on September 11, 2001.

New York City is also a major character, Scott said.

Many scenes were shot below ground in subway tunnels and a closed down transit station in lower Manhattan, mostly at night, Scott said. It took four weeks of tedious shooting, he said.

“It’s just a whole other world down there,” said Washington.

An old train car was rebuilt to accommodate cameras and placed on a sound stage in Queens for scenes that couldn’t be shot underground, Scott said.

The same person who designed the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) high-tech control center was hired to build a replica on a sound stage in Queens, he said.

Brian Helgeland, who wrote the screenplay, revealed the secret about why he would use an older movie title for a film they do not want seen as a remake.

Since Sony Pictures already owned the rights to “The Taking of Pelham 123,” it made it an easier sell to the studio, he said. The original film, whose title had the number spelled out — “One Two Three” — was based on a best-selling 1973 novel by John Godey, and starred Robert Shaw as the villain opposite Matthau.

“The start was using that as a title, something the studio would feel comfortable making rather than just a nameless, orphan idea that you might have on your own, to try to put that together and use ‘Pelham’ as a springboard to make your own crime movie,” Helgeland said.

He tried to stay away from the original “Pelham” particulars “but we had the same situation as the core, which was a hostage situation with one guy in the train with the hostages and another guy outside dealing with him over the radio.”

Putting the movie together, he said, was “a little bit like trying to pull off a heist, putting the pieces together, with a getaway car driver and a safecracker and all that stuff.”

Carrie Prejean has been dethroned as Miss California USA for “contract violations,” including missing scheduled pageant events, according to a state pageant official.

Donald Trump poses with Carrie Prejean in May. Prejean was removed as Miss California USA on Wednesday.

Prejean, 22, retained her title last month despite a controversy over topless photos, missed appearances and her statements against same-sex marriage.

Miss USA pageant owner Donald Trump decided to fire Prejean a month after he gave her a second chance.

“Carrie is a beautiful young woman, and I wish her well as she pursues her other interests,” Trump said.

Runner-up Tami Farrell, who was Miss Malibu, will immediately assume the Miss California USA title, state pageant Executive Director Keith Lewis said.

“This was a decision based solely on contract violations, including Ms. Prejean’s unwillingness to make appearances on behalf of the Miss California USA organization,” he said.

Lewis told CNN’s Larry King on Wednesday that it wasn’t one thing Prejean did, but “many, many, many things.”

“She came to us and said I’m not interested in your input; I’ll make my own decision what I’m going to do,” Lewis said. “You know, when you have a contract, when you’re working for someone you have a responsibility to follow through on what that requirement is.”

Lewis told King it was clear “she was not interesting in upholding the title or the responsibilities.”

Trump brought Prejean and Lewis together in New York for a meeting last month, after which he announced that communications between the beauty queen and pageant officials had been repaired.

“I told Carrie she needed to get back to work and honor her contract with the Miss California USA organization, and I gave her the opportunity to do so,” Trump said. “Unfortunately, it just doesn’t look like it is going to happen, and I offered Keith my full support in making this decision.”

Charles Limandri, Prejean’s lawyer, said she learned about the decision Wednesday morning in a phone call from Trump’s office.

“This is all kind of a big shock,” Limandri said. “We’ve been working with Mr. Trump’s office. She’s been doing all the speaking engagements she’s been asked to do. It is not true that she has not been cooperating.”

No one from the pageant organization ever warned Prejean she was not doing what they wanted, he said.

“Something is going on,” he said. “Truth is not being told. I don’t understand where this is coming from, or why.”

“For people to say that she breached her contract, that she is not doing speaking engagements is false,” he said. “She did one last Sunday in Las Vegas and it went really well.”

Prejean stepped into controversy at the Miss USA pageant in April when she declared her opposition to same-sex marriage in a response to a question asked during the national pageant by Perez Hilton, a pageant judge. Prejean finished as first runner-up, but it was not clear if her answer cost her the crown.

During a radio interview Wednesday with Billy Bush, who also was host of the pageant, Prejean said it was that controversy that led to her losing her title, not contract issues.

“It’s just because of my answer, I think,” Prejean told Bush. “None of this would be happening right now if I just said yeah, gays should get married, you’re right Perez Hilton.”

Wednesday night on Larry King, Bush asked the new Miss California USA the question that sparked controversy for Prejean. Bush asked Tami Farrell whether in light of several states allowing gay marriage she thought other states should do the same.

“I think it’s a personal decision and a civil rights issue,” Farrell said. “It’s something we should let each state decide.”

In addition to Prejean’s gay marriage answer, controversy boiled to a new level in early May when seminude photos of Prejean appeared on gossip Web sites.

Miss California USA officials — some of them outspoken advocates of same-sex marriage — suggested the photos breached the contract Prejean signed with the pageant. These officials also complained they couldn’t reach Prejean and she had missed important pageant events.

The controversy seemed over when Trump declared the pictures not to be too racy and Prejean promised to do better in communicating with the state pageant.

Hilton, the judge who asked the same-sex question during the pageant, cheered Prejean’s firing.

“Better late than never,” Hilton said.

Shanna Moakler, a former Miss USA who resigned as co-executive director of the California pageant when Trump did not dismiss Prejean last month, welcomed Wednesday’s decision.

“First and foremost, my faith has been restored in the Miss Universe organization and with Donald Trump,” Moakler said. “I believed eventually what I intimately knew would come to fruition.”

Three of five Americans contractors detained in Baghdad have been ordered released by an Iraqi judge, because of insufficient evidence, a court spokesman said Thursday.

In a CNN exclusive, video shows U.S. contractors taken into custody by Iraqi authorities.

The other two other contractors remain in custody, according to Judge Abdul Sattar al-Beeraqdar, a spokesman for Iraq’s Higher Judicial Council.

One of the men has been released on bond, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad confirmed Thursday.

The embassy did not identify the man, who was released Wednesday. However, a spokesman for his employer, Corporate Training Unlimited, said it was Donald Feeney. Judy Feeney, Donald’s wife, also confirmed his release.

The contracting company said the release of the others has been delayed because of a procedural issue.

Judy Feeney said her son, Donald Feeney III, and Mark Bridges were to be released Thursday morning, but it may take more time to release the other two, Jason Jones and Micah Milligan.

But al-Beeraqdar said, without naming names, that two contractors were being held on charges involving “illegal substances” found on the men when they were taken into custody.

Those who have been released are not allowed to leave the country because of an ongoing investigation and the judge may want to question them again, according to al-Beeraqdar.

Except for Jones, the detained contractors work for the Fayetteville, North Carolina-based CTU, a security firm headed by the elder Feeney.

An Iraqi judge decided earlier on Wednesday that charges against the five contractors were not warranted and that they could be released, according to an Iraqi security source and a source close to the five.

The sources requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, in which the contractors have been detained since last week for reasons that remain unclear.

The contractors initially had been told they were being held in connection with the May death of another contractor, James Kitterman, said the source close to the five.

But on Monday, according to a judicial source, the men were told they were being held on suspicion of having unregistered weapons.

Still, they were asked about their activities around the time Kitterman was killed, and Iraqi government officials told CNN Monday the five were detained as suspects in connection with Kitterman’s slaying.

Kitterman was found bound, blindfolded and fatally stabbed in a car in Baghdad’s Green Zone on May 22. The 60-year-old Houston, Texas, resident owned a construction company that operated in Iraq.

The Green Zone is the high-security area in central Baghdad that contains the U.S. Embassy and key Iraqi government buildings. Access to the area, formally known as the International Zone, is tightly controlled.

The five contractors were taken into custody on June 3 in a pre-dawn Green Zone raid by Iraqi and U.S. personnel, the security source told CNN on Sunday.

During the raid, troops also confiscated weapons, the Iraqi security source said. Three of the contractors were suspected of being directly involved in Kitterman’s death, the Iraqi source said.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman said the search was an Iraqi operation, but FBI representatives were present at the request of Iraqi authorities.

The five were transferred to a prison within the Green Zone on Friday.

“After this murder inside the Green Zone, a joint investigation committee from U.S. and Iraq sides has been formed to investigate this incident,” Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Karim Khalaf told CNN, “and this committee managed to collect a number of indications that those five are linked to this murder.”

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh also said the men were detained based on information linking them to the Kitterman slaying.

Under Iraqi law, after a person is detained, an investigative judge questions the accused and assesses the evidence. The judge then decides whether there is sufficient evidence, and either refers the case to trial or dismisses it.

The Iraqi source said the five had been held in a separate holding area and not with other Iraqi detainees, but spent time in a courtyard with other Iraqi detainees. A U.S. Embassy spokesman said consular officials had visited with them and “they appeared well.”

The source close to the suspects said Sunday that each of the five men insisted they had alibis that will clear them and they were eager to tell their stories to a judge.

The Feeneys had known Kitterman for six years from their time in the Green Zone and “respected him,” Corporate Training Unlimited spokeswoman Sarah Smith told CNN.