A suicide bomber killed four people near a checkpoint south of Baghdad and militants abducted three senior Iraqi officials today amid fears of an escalating insurgency aimed at sabotaging elections scheduled for January 30 th.
Iraqi police said a suicide car bomb tore through a petrol station in the village of Mahaweel, south of Baghdad, killing four people and wounding 19 others.
Meanwhile, three Sunni officials from Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit were abducted on a road south of Baghdad while returning from the Shia holy city of Najaf where they held talks with Shia leaders to bridge sectarian divisions over the elections.
The delegation included the head of the northern Salaheddin provincial council, the deputy to the provincial governor and the dean of Tikrit law school, police and tribal sources said.
Some leaders of Saddam's once-privileged Sunni minority have called for a delay in the vote, saying persistent attacks in the Sunni heartland would scare away many voters and skew the results in favour of the long-marginalised Shia majority.
But interim Prime Minister Mr Iyad Allawi has rejected any postponement of the vote, which is expected to cement the Shias' newfound political dominance.
The US military said today it had captured a key leader in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
's insurgent network in late December. It identified the man as Abdul Aziz Sa'dun Ahmed Hamduni, also known as Abu Ahmed, and said he had assumed command of "terrorist operations" in Mosul after the cell's chief was arrested earlier in the month.
In other violence today, gunmen shot dead two Iraqi National Guards south of Samarra, and the bodies of three Iraqi contractors who worked with American forces were found near the northern city, security officials said.