By AFP,
Baghdad : Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki vowed on Thursday to capture the assassins of an anti-American Shiite MP, the first lawmaker to be killed in 18 months, and ordered a top-level investigation.
Maliki said he appointed a panel headed by Interior Minister Jawad Bolani to probe the assassination of Saleh al-Ogayly, 41, in Baghdad’s Sadr City district, a Shiite stronghold.
“We reaffirm our determination to get at the hotbeds of terrorism and crime and arrest and prosecute the killers and bring them to justice,” the prime minister said in a statement.
The Sadrist MP became the first Iraqi legislator to be killed since the April 12, 2007 suicide bombing of the national parliament, where one lawmaker and seven others died.
The assassination was strongly condemned by US ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Raymond Odierno, the commander of US forces in Iraq. “This heinous crime was not just an attack against Dr. al-Ogayly.
It was an attack against Iraq’s democratic institutions,” Crocker and Odierno said in a joint statement.
“We call on all sides to resolve their differences with dialogue and negotiations through national institutions.” The latest bombing marked a spike in violence at a time when US and Iraqi officials are saying bloodshed is at a four-year low.
Ogayly was among eight people killed on Thursday in fresh attacks in and around Baghdad.
The lawmaker was killed when home-made bomb on a parked motorcycle blew up, also killing a bystander and wounding four people, security officials said. Ogayly, a father of five children, was a member of the parliamentary group of radical anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Sadrists have 28 members in the 275 parliament and are a key opposition.
Police stepped up checks on vehicles and pedestrians entering Sadr City, causing longer than usual delays in entering the impoverished Shiite stronghold where two million people live, residents said.
Security officials said a second roadside bombing in Baghdad killed a civilian and wounded four people, two of them policemen. Both attacks were in Sadr City. A driver of a car was also killed in central Baghdad when a bomb went off inside his vehicle, police said.
Heavy fighting in Sadr City in March and April between Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia and security forces left hundreds dead before a ceasefire went into effect in May. Despite the truce, the district has seen frequent violence.
In another roadside bomb attack just north of Baghdad, an Iraqi Sunni militia leader working with US forces was killed along with two of his children and a nephew, security officials said.
Abbas Khudair, who heads a Sahwa, or Awakening group, that is paid by American forces, was targeted as he drove with his family in the Al-Uthaim area in Baquba, the capital of the restive Diyala province, they said.
An AFP photographer saw the bodies of Khudair, his son and daughter and the nephew taken away to the local hospital, where five more relatives were being treated for blast wounds.
Sahwa members are mostly former insurgents who fought US and Iraqi forces after dictator Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003, but helped curb violence since late 2006 after they sided with the Americans to battle Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda has been blamed by the US military for most of the brutal violence in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The latest attacks came a day after the top US commander in Baghdad, Major General Jeffery Hammond, said the improvement in security in the capital of six million was dramatic, but dangers remained.