IRAQ: US efforts to stabilise Iraq ahead of next month's transfer of sovereignty were dealt a huge blow yesterday when the head of Iraq's US-appointed governing council was killed by a suicide car bomber.
The killing came as a small amount of the nerve agent sarin was found in a road-side bomb which exploded.
Izzedin Salim, also known as Abdul Zahra Othman, a moderate Shia who had spent nearly 25 years in exile, was blown up while waiting at a US checkpoint in a suburban Baghdad street.
Six other Iraqis were killed in the blast, including Mr Salim's driver and bodyguards.
Mr Salim took over as rotating president of the governing council this month. He was the second and the most high-ranking of its members to be assassinated since last year's invasion. His death comes at a critical time for the US-led coalition, which appears increasingly clueless as to how to deal with the worsening insurgency. The Bush administration's envoy in Iraq, Mr Paul Bremer, described it as a vile act. "The terrorists who are seeking to destroy Iraq have struck a cruel blow but they will be defeated," he said.
A previously unknown group, the Arab Resistance Movement, said it killed Mr Salim, calling him a "traitor and mercenary". The claim could not be verified.
Mr Salim had been on his way to the regular Monday morning meeting of the Iraqi governing council inside the coalition's headquarters when a battered Volkswagen Passat cut in front of Mr Salim's Land Cruiser and exploded, one of his drivers, Abdul Karim, said.
"I saw the driver but only for a moment. He had dark skin and dark hair. He was alone in the car." Another witness, Saad al Mukhtar, said: "We were inside the house. All our windows were blown in. I ran out. I saw three people burning in the fire. One of them was crawling on the ground." Mr Salim was thrown out of his car by the blast. He died in hospital soon afterwards from head injuries.
A newspaper editor and writer, he was head of the Basra-based Islamic Da'wah movement and had lived in Iran until last year.
Yesterday one of his closest friends and former colleagues, Jawad al-Maliki, said he had taken an uncompromising stand against both Saddam and political extremism.
"He stood for civilised Islam," he said. "He was a gentle man." Breaking down in tears, he added: "His son phoned me from Australia to ask what had happened. I had to tell him his father was dead. The US has not got a grip on security. They have no intelligence. They have no information. They just sit behind their tanks."
Mr Salim's killing comes amid mounting evidence that Iraqis working inside the Coalition Provisional Authority as translators or policemen are passing on information to Iraqi fighters.
Dr Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni former foreign minister who is tipped to be Iraq's next president, was ahead of Mr Salim's car and had just driven into the coalition's "green zone" when the bomb went off.
Last September, Aquila al-Hashimi, one of only three women on the council, was shot and ambushed outside her Baghdad home. She died five days later.
Meanwhile, two US soldiers were treated for "minor exposure to nerve agent," following the explosion of a bomb containing sarin nerve gas. It was not clear how seriously the soldiers were affected. The agent was contained inside a 155mm artillery shell, one of the more common devices used in the past year for roadside bombs.
It was the first time that chemical or biological agents have been detected in attacks on US troops. Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt said the shell appeared to date back to a type of weapon which the Iraqi regime claimed to have destroyed before the 1991 Gulf war.
He said it was unlikely that the insurgents who planted the bomb even knew it contained sarin. - (Guardian Service)
Two Russian engineers abducted in Iraq earlier this month were freed yesterday close to where they were seized in the southern outskirts of Baghdad.
Mr Andrei Meshcheryakov and Mr Alexander Gordiyenko looked tired but in good health after being kidnapped on May 10th when their car was ambushed and one of their colleagues shot dead.