IRAQ: Gunmen in camouflage uniforms kidnapped Iraq's deputy health minister from his home yesterday, the day after another prominent Shia politician was shot dead amid brewing sectarian strife.
It was the latest incident over the past week that cast doubt on the loyalties of Iraq's US-trained security forces.
A suicide bomber earlier killed 22 people in a Shia town south of Baghdad after luring day labourers with the promise of work and then detonating explosives in a minibus.
A Sunni Islamist group claimed the attack in Hilla, calling it revenge for a mass kidnap from a Sunni-run Baghdad ministry that many Sunnis blame on Shia militiamen in police uniform.
In Baghdad, Ammar al-Saffar (50), a member of Shia prime minister Nuri al-Maliki's Dawa party, was taken away by gunmen wearing uniforms who were accompanied by three men in suits, a neighbour, who declined to be identified, said.
An interior ministry official said the gunmen arrived in six vehicles at the home Saffar shared with his sister in the mainly Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya shortly after sunset.
Saffar survived an assassination attempt in June 2004.
The apparent abduction came the day after Ali al-Adhadh of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Dawa ally, was shot dead with his wife as he drove in mainly Sunni west Baghdad, police and a party official said.
Tuesday's mass kidnap at the higher education ministry was followed by the kidnapping of Shia bus passengers by uniformed men who set up checkpoints in a Sunni district.
The Shia-held interior ministry has said all the civil servants were released days ago - but the Sunni higher education minister is boycotting the government until 66 people the ministry says are missing are accounted for.
With US president George W. Bush looking for fresh ideas that could help calm violence and let US troops go home, there have been new calls from his allies and in Washington for him to talk to Syria and Iran, both at loggerheads with the US and blamed by it for fomenting trouble in Iraq.
A spokesman for police in the mainly Shia city of Hilla, 100 kilometres south of the capital, said that 49 people were wounded in the early morning blast, when shrapnel tore through the expectant crowd as labourers jostled to come closer.
The tactic has been used before by al-Qaeda-linked Sunni militants at spots where men congregate hoping to find casual work.
"I was standing with other labourers when the minibus came and the driver asked for labourers.
"Everybody ran towards him and then he detonated his vehicle," Ali Mohammed told Reuters as he lay in a local hospital, his left thigh bandaged. - (Reuters)