A sister of Iraq's new Sunni Arab vice president was killed in a drive-by shooting in Baghdad yesterday, police said. She died one day after her brother called for the Sunni-dominated insurgency to be crushed by force.
In southern Iraq, a bomb hit an Italian military convoy at 8:30am yesterday, killing four soldiers -- three Italians and a Romanian -- and seriously injuring a fifth person, Italy's government said. Italian news agency reports said many more were injured.
The explosion near an Italian military base was caused by a roadside bomb that hit the convoy in Nasiriyah, a largely Shiite city 320km southeast of Baghdad, said local Iraqi government spokesman Haidr Radhi. He said three Italian soldiers were killed and two wounded.
PHOTO: EPA
More than 2,000 Italian troops are stationed in Nasiriyah.
The violence came as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were visiting Baghdad to meet with officials in the new Iraqi government.
Mayson Ahmed Bakir al-Hashimi, whose brother, Tariq al-Hashimi, was appointed as vice president on Saturday, was killed by unidentified gunmen in a BMW sedan as she was leaving her home at 8am with her bodyguard in southwestern Baghdad, said police Captain Jamel Hussein. The bodyguard, Saad Ali, also died in the shooting, Hussein said.
It was the second recent killing in Tariq al-Hashimi's immediate family. On April 13, his brother, Mahmoud al-Hashimi, was shot while driving in a mostly Shiite area of eastern Baghdad.
Yesterday, two of the vice president's brothers, one an army officer, raced to the scene to recover the bodies of their sister, who was married with children, Hussein said.
The television station Baghdad, owned by the vice president's Iraqi Islamic Party, showed home photos of Mayson al-Hashimi, a woman in her 50s wearing an orange headscarf, and footage of her bullet-riddled white SUV, while playing mournful music.
It was not immediately possible to contact the vice president. An official reached by telephone at the headquarters of the Iraqi Islamic Party in Baghdad declined to comment.
The party is one of three major Sunni political groups in the Iraqi Accordance Front which won 44 seats in the Dec. 15 parliamentary election.
On April 17, the brother of another leading Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlaq, was found dead in Baghdad after he was kidnapped.
Yesterday's killings came as Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite hard-liner recently tapped as Iraq's prime minister, is trying to form a new national unity government aimed at stopping a wave of sectarian violence in Iraq.
Al-Maliki has 30 days to assemble a Cabinet from divided Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties. The most contentious question will be filling key ministries that control security forces amid demands to purge them of militias blamed for the rise in sectarian bloodshed.
On Wednesday, Vice President al-Hashimi had made a show of unity with his Kurdish and Shiite colleagues, calling for Iraq's insurgency to be put down by force.
Shiites had demanded that Sunni officials make such a statement as a show of their commitment to building a democratic system.
Al-Hashimi shrugged off a videotape by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, widely seen on TV on Tuesday, during which the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader tried to rally Sunnis to fight the new government and denounced Sunnis who cooperate with it as "agents" of the US.
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