A day after Iraq's interior minister said that all of his officers who had been arrested in a security crackdown were to be released, their status remained unclear on Saturday. A senior adviser to the minister, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that some of the ministry detainees had been released Saturday and that others would be released Sunday. But the Interior Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, told the news service Agence France-Presse that all the ministry detainees, reported earlier to be 24 people, were freed on Saturday morning. The ministry officers were arrested over several days in the past week amid rumors that a coup plot or an attack on the ministry building was in the works. In public comments later, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki denied that the officials were being investigated for plotting a coup but said that the inquiry was continuing. Officials have delivered conflicting accounts on what possible crimes are being investigated, but some have said the detainees are suspected of supporting terrorist operations and having affiliations with Al Awda, a party related to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which was banned after the American invasion. The episode has become a showdown between Mr. Maliki, who ordered the committee that has been conducting the investigations, and Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, who publicly condemned the accusations on Friday, calling them false and politically motivated. Many Iraqi politicians were surprised by the strong words from Mr. Bolani, who had been considered a minor political figure. Several said Mr. Bolani, who has been aggressively expanding his secular Iraqi Constitutional Party, had ambitions to become prime minister and was using the situation to bolster his political credentials. "The minister of the interior is trying to stand against the prime minister," said Qassim Dawoud, an independent Shiite lawmaker. "I do not believe in the stories of a military coup; this is a struggle between two political parties." Also on Saturday, the Iraqi Parliament rejected a bill that would have governed the presence of troops from Britain, Australia and other countries beyond the end of the year. Lawmakers said the rejection was not a judgment on Iraq's relationship with those countries, but derived from a belief that the troops should instead be governed by an international agreement, like the one recently signed with the United States. "We have rejected the mechanism of having a local law with a country like Britain," said Bassam Sharif, a Shiite member of Parliament. "The government should have made a treaty or an official agreement with such a country and not a local law." The saga of the shoe-throwing journalist and the following he has inspired continued Saturday. During a tense overnight sit-in at a Baghdad park in support of the reporter, Muntader al-Zaidi, who has been jailed since throwing his shoes at President Bush last Sunday, the Iraqi Army threatened to remove protesters by force but eventually allowed them to stay. As many as 400 protesters gathered in the park near the Green Zone on Saturday afternoon, holding pictures of Mr. Zaidi and chanting: "Bush, Bush listen carefully We bid you farewell with two shoes." Heavily armed soldiers surrounded the small park, and Iraqi Army helicopters circled overhead as the demonstrators were told to leave. "I have told them I won't move anywhere unless it is to my grave," said Uday al-Zaidi, 32, one of the reporter's brothers. The demonstration, which began early Friday, continued the theme of presenting Mr. Zaidi, a Shiite television journalist, as a unifier of a fractured nation. Signs pictured Mr. Zaidi, 29, in a traditional white Arab headdress, not commonly seen in Baghdad, proclaiming him in Arabic as "the son of Iraq" and "the humiliator of the occupiers." At lunchtime, a group from the largely Sunni city of Samarra joined the mostly Shiite crowd in an unusual gesture of sectarian unity. The groups sat together on the park's patchy grass, sharing large plates of rice, raisins and lamb. A few of the soldiers also ate the food offered them, although they stayed close to their military vehicles.