Senior Iraqi official shot

2004-06-13 11:04

Baghdad - Insurgents here on Sunday assassinated a second senior Iraqi official in 24 hours and scored a direct hit on the US-led coalition's headquarters in Iraq, damaging Saddam Hussein's former main palace.

Kamal Jarrah, the director of cultural relations at Iraq's culture ministry, was gunned down in front of his home in the west of the capital as he left for work, an official at the ministry said.

"Unknown attackers opened fire on Kamal Jarrah in front of his house in the Ghazalia quarter, killing him immediately," the ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

The attack bore marked similarities to the killing on Saturday of Iraq's deputy foreign minister, Bassam Kubba, who was also shot while leaving for the office in an attack blamed by the ministry on Saddam loyalists.

Kubba, just returned from New York where he was part of an Iraqi delegation to the United Nations, was the first national official to be assassinated since the country's new caretaker government was unveiled less than two weeks ago.

Another high-profile figure, General Hussein Mustapha, who heads Iraq's border guards, narrowly escaped an ambush on Saturday as his two-car convoy was sprayed with bullets on a Baghdad highway.

Insurgents have waged an assassination campaign against police, civil servants and politicians in a bid to derail the US-led occupation and its reconstruction efforts.

Shiite politician Ezzedine Salim, who was rotating president last month of the now dissolved Governing Council, was assassinated on May 17 by a car bomb.

As the countdown to a US-led plan to return sovereignty to Iraq on June 30 gathers pace, fears of a correlated rise in violence are playing true.

For the first time, attackers on Sunday hit Saddam's former main palace in Baghdad, now used by the US-coalition, but no casualties were immediately reported.

A rocket or a mortar struck the roof of the Republican Palace causing minor damage, said an official working for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which occupies the heavily-fortified Green Zone surrounding the building.

A second foreigner, who was in the palace at the time of the attack, said the blast shattered several windows.

"When you walk around the area it is a mess," he said, adding, "I do not see any ambulances, however, which is a good sign."

Insurgents fighting the US-led occupation of Iraq frequently target the Green Zone in the centre of Baghdad with mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenades.

They had, until now, failed to hit Saddam's main palace, which is occupied by the coalition and will be partly used by US embassy workers following the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government at the end of the month.

In further unrest late on Saturday, Kurdish religious leader Sheikh Iyad Kurshid Abdel Razzak was shot and killed when assailants attacked his home in Kirkuk, 255km north of Baghdad.

Adding to the weekend tensions a Lebanese diplomat said the butchered bodies of one Lebanese and two Iraqis working for a telecommunication company were found on a road west of Baghdad on Friday.

The three, kidnapped on Thursday, had had their throats slashed.

But seven Turkish construction workers kidnapped in the same area were released on Saturday.

- AFP