Leading Shiite Politician Gunned Down With Wife
Fate of Ministry Hostages Still in Dispute
|
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
Sunday, November 19, 2006
BAGHDAD, Nov. 18 -- Gunmen killed a prominent Shiite politician Saturday in what police and others said appeared to have been a sectarian assassination.
Ali al-Adhadh of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the country's largest Shiite religious parties, was shot dead with his wife as he drove in mainly Sunni west Baghdad, police and party member Adnan al-Obeidi said.
Obeidi said Adhadh was a member of the organization's shura council, the central decision-making body of the party, which was founded in Iran in the 1980s to oppose Saddam Hussein. Adhadh had been set to serve as ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, a city where he was long the group's representative.
Members of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority accuse the Supreme Council, led by Abdul Aziz Hakim, and its armed wing, the Badr Organization, of running death squads, as well as being involved in killing defense lawyers in Hussein's trial -- allegations they strongly deny.
Continuing arguments Saturday between Sunni- and Shiite-run ministries about the fate of hostages seized from a branch of the Higher Education Ministry on Tuesday underlined the extent to which sectarianism infects politics at the top.
An official at the ministry, which is run by Sunnis, said he had lists of 66 people, including 20 visitors, still unaccounted for. He said a released hostage had seen two others suffocated after being gagged with cotton wool and tortured. Another official said five hostages released on Friday had been tortured.
The U.S. military said in a statement that Iraqi special forces backed by U.S. advisers had conducted a raid against a kidnapping cell in Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold where witnesses said the ministry hostages had been taken. But a spokesman for the Shiite-run Interior Ministry, Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, said: "This matter is now closed, and we have declared all the hostages released."
In the south, security forces were hunting for five Western contractors, including four Americans, who were kidnapped Thursday by men in uniform.
