Gunmen shot dead a US freelance journalist in the southern Iraqi city of Basra as Iraqi politicians drafting the new constitution debated details of the charter yesterday including rights for Jews.
US journalist Steven Vincent, 50, was snatched on Tuesday evening from a street in central Basra and later shot dead, police and the US embassy in Baghdad said.
Vincent, who had been in Basra for the last two months, was picked up along with his female Iraqi translator who was also shot twice but survived.
"Vincent was killed, while the girl is alive," police lieutenant-colonel Karim al-Zaidi said.
Vincent, probably the first US journalist to be kidnapped and killed, was wearing a black T-shirt that had a photograph of revered Shiite saint Hussein Ali and a symbolic necklace usually worn by Shiite Muslims, sources said.
"There were four gunmen in a white pick-up truck and they kidnapped the two," Zaidi said.
Southern Iraq, where the British military is based, has remained relatively calm since the US-led war of March 2003, largely avoiding the daily diet of deadly violence in many other parts of the country.
"Vincent's body was recovered by local Basra authorities and the US forces, along with the British forces, will determine who is responsible for the death," US embassy acting spokesman Peter Mitchell said.
Another Western official said Vincent's body had multiple gunshot wounds. "We do not know the circumstances of his death, but we do not believe it was a drive-by shooting," the official said.
Vincent wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times and the conservative National Review magazine. He had also written a book on Iraq titled In The Red Zone.
US-based media-rights group the Committee to Protect Journalists recently said that at least 23 journalists were killed in Iraq last year, 17 of them Iraqis.
Iraq's panel drafting the new post-Saddam Hussein constitution met again in Baghdad yesterday to discuss the finer details of the new basic law.
The committee was to discuss fundamental rights, including the return of nationality to Jews, Muther Al-Fadhil, a Kurdish panelist said.
The draft proposes to bar Iraqi-born Jews living in exile from recovering their Iraqi nationality.
Most panelists had earlier agreed to return the nationality to those Jews who had lost it after 1963. The date is important as it coincides with the first coup that put the nationalist Baath party in power, by which time there were few Jews left in the country.
Ansar al-Sunna, an extremist group linked with the al-Qaeda network, said in an Internet statement it had killed eight US marines in western Iraq.
On Tuesday the US military said that seven marines were killed on Monday in two separate attacks west of the capital.
Ansar al-Sunna said it killed some of the marines by "slitting their throats," while others were shot.
The total number of US military personnel killed in Iraq since the March 2003 US-led invasion stood at 1,787 as of Monday
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