IRAQ: Gunmen killed an Iraqi journalist working for a US-funded television network in Basra and assassinated a senior government official in Baghdad yesterday in the latest attacks following the January 30th election.
Police in Basra, 550 km southeast of Baghdad, said Alhurra correspondent Abdul-Hussein Khazal had been shot dead at his home in the mainly Shia city. Alhurra is a Virginia-based satellite news network set up with US funding to compete with such Arabic channels as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.
Alhurra said one of Khazal's sons had also been killed. He was three years old.
Police in Baghdad said a director in the Ministry of Culture and Housing was assassinated yesterday evening when gunmen attacked his car. Earlier, gunmen kidnapped a senior Interior Ministry official, Col Riyadh Katei Aliwi.
In Baghdad's Haifa Street area, an insurgent stronghold, three members of the Kurdistan Democratic Party were killed in an ambush, and guerrillas skirmished with US and Iraqi forces.
North of the capital, a US soldier was killed in an attack by insurgents near the town of Balad, the military said.
Millions of Iraqis braved suicide bombs and mortar attacks to vote in last month's poll, defying threats by insurgents who had vowed to wreck the election. But in recent days, guerrillas trying to overthrow the US-backed government have struck back.
On Tuesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up among a crowd of men waiting to be recruited into Iraq's security forces at a disused airfield in Baghdad, killing at least 21 people.
The previous day, suicide attacks against police in Mosul and Baquba, north of the capital, killed 27 people.
Meanwhile, Iraq's Electoral Commission said a final vote tally would be delayed while around 300 ballot boxes were re-examined.
Gunmen in Mosul tampered with a number of ballot boxes on election day, prompting the commission to recheck other boxes at random. - Reuters