IRAQ: Gunmen kidnapped an Italian journalist in Baghdad yesterday, the latest in a series of abductions targeting foreign workers in Iraq.
Giuliana Sgrena, a journalist with communist Rome newspaper Il Manifesto, was grabbed from the street as she conducted interviews near Baghdad university. Gunmen pulled up alongside her vehicle, forced her driver and an Iraqi journalist out at gunpoint and drove off with Sgrena, police officials said.
Dozens of foreigners have been abducted by insurgents across the country and a number murdered since the spate of hostage taking erupted last April.
In September two Italian aid workers, Simona Pari and Simona Toretta, were kidnapped but later released amid rumours a $1 million ransom had been paid by the Italian government.
A colleague of Sgrena's, radio journalist Barbara Schiavulli, said she was speaking to Sgrena on the telephone as she was being abducted. "Giuliana was my room-mate. She called me an hour ago while they were taking her away. I heard the shots," she said.
"I started to shout 'Giuliana, Giuliana', but she didn't answer."
A French journalist, Florence Aubenas, was snatched from her car in Baghdad in mid-January and is still being held.
Meanwhile it began to emerge that the Shia coalition was dominating the national assembly elections in most of Iraq's southern provinces and seems likely to be the strongest party overall, according to the first partial election results, covering 1.6m votes, released yesterday.
Election officials pointed out that the results did not not yet represent a national trend.
They show the United Iraqi Alliance winning 71.6% in the areas involved. The interim prime minister Ayad Allawi has 18.1%; no other party has more than 1% or 2%.
As negotiations to form a new government began, a wave of insurgent attacks claimed 28 lives, making yesterday the bloodiest day since Sunday's elections.
Gunmen shot dead 12 Iraqi soldiers after ordering them off a minibus near the northern city of Kirkuk. Two Iraqi contract workers were killed near a military base in Baquba, north of Baghdad, and two civilians were killed by a mortar attack on a US base in Tal Afar, near Mosul.
A suicide car bomber attacked a convoy of foreigners on the road to Baghdad airport and there appeared to be a number of casualties.
Additional reporting: Reuters, Guardian service