BAGHDAD, Iraq – Gunmen firing from a car killed Iraq’s deputy foreign minister Saturday in the first assassination of a senior official since the new interim government was announced this month. Iraqi authorities blamed Saddam Hussein loyalists.
Bassam Salih Kubba, 60, the slain minister, was Iraq’s most senior career diplomat and was slated to stay on in the new administration that takes over after June 30 from the U.S.-led occupation authority.
Kubba was mortally wounded when gunmen drove up behind his car in the city’s Azimiyah district and opened fire, Foreign Ministry spokesman Thamir al-Adhami said.
The assailants then passed the stricken vehicle and fired a second time, the spokesman said. Kubba’s driver escaped injury, but Kubba died in a hospital.
Azimiyah is a predominantly Sunni Muslim neighborhood where Saddam took refuge as American forces overran the city in April 2003 and support for the former regime runs strong there.
The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the attack “bears all the hallmarks of leftover supporters of Saddam Hussein’s evil regime.”
Kubba was the second senior Iraqi figure to be killed in the past three weeks and the first since U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi appointed the new leadership to take power June 30.
Izzadine Saleem, who at the time headed the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council, was killed May 17 in a suicide car-bombing near the entrance to the heavily fortified Green Zone headquarters of the American-run occupation authority.
Ten days later, gunmen ambushed the convoy of another Governing Council member, Salama al-Khafaji, south of Baghdad, killing her son and her chief bodyguard.
In a sign of the continuing security crisis, a Lebanese Foreign Ministry official said a Lebanese construction worker, Hussein Ali Alyan, had been shot dead by kidnappers and his body found Saturday near Fallujah.
The official, Mohammed Issa, said Alyan was among three Lebanese who had been abducted by Iraq although he did not say when. One was freed and the other is missing.
Hassan Hijazi, the senior Lebanese diplomat in Baghdad, told the privately owned Voice of Lebanon radio that gunmen wearing Iraqi police uniforms were kidnapping foreigners with the aim of seeking ransoms.
On Saturday, seven Turkish contractors who had been abducted while working for a Turkish construction company were freed in Fallujah by their captors. Serdar Adali, a director of the Turkish construction company which employed them, told CNN-Turk television that “prominent families” in Iraq had helped secure the release.
More than 40 people from several countries have been abducted in Iraq since April – although many of them have been released or freed by coalition soldiers.
Three Americans – Pfc. Keith Maupin of Batavia, Ohio, William Bradley of Chesterfield, N.H. and Timothy Bell of Mobile, Ala. – are missing since their convoy was attacked April 9 outside Baghdad.
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