BAGHDAD, 19 November 2006 — Gunmen shot dead a leading member of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite political party and his wife as they were driving through western Baghdad yesterday, police and a party official said. Ali Al-Adhadh represented the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) in Geneva for many years before returning to Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, fellow SCIRI member Adnan Al-Obeidi told Reuters.

Obeidi said Adhadh was a member of SCIRI’s Shoura Council, the central decision-making body of the party that now dominates the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki. Adhadh was shot dead close to his home at the intersection of the Yarmouk and Mansour districts, in the heart of mainly Sunni west Baghdad, police said.

His death came against the background of continuing sectarian bloodletting between Shiites and Sunnis, and a relentless Sunni insurgency that seeks to topple the Shiite-led government.

Meanwhile, security forces were hunting yesterday for five Westerners kidnapped two days ago in Iraq. Four US citizens and an Austrian, working as security guards for a Kuwaiti company, were kidnapped on Thursday while escorting a convoy near the southern town of Safwan, but Iraqi officials denied reports one had been killed and two freed.

The kidnapping, which came just two days after dozens were abducted from a Baghdad ministry building, many of whom remain missing, was yet another example of increased violence in Iraq.

Ten people were killed yesterday, while police also found 23 corpses in Iraq, including 20 in Baghdad.

And the US military said 11 “terrorists” were killed in a number of raids across Iraq, including one in Baghdad’s Shiite bastion Sadr City.

Militiamen disguised as police officers seized the five Westerners as they guarded a convoy of trucks from Kuwait that were stopped at “what appeared to be a police checkpoint near Safwan,” a senior US official told AFP Friday.

Yesterday, Ali Al-Mussawi, chief of operations at Basra police headquarters, said that all the five were still held captive.

“We have not rescued anybody or nobody has been found killed as reported yesterday. All the five are still missing,” he said.

On Friday a Basra provincial official said two American hostages had been rescued in a police raid and that one was found dead. “Iraqi police found the body of an American where they conducted a raid in which two other Americans were freed,” the official said.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Army in Iraq, one of the country’s main Sunni extremist groups, called on its fighters to carry out attacks against the government for launching a probe into a leading Sunni leader, according to an Internet statement posted yesterday that could not be independently verified.

On Friday Iraqi government spokesman Ali Al-Dabbagh said that a criminal investigation had been opened into the activities of Harith Al-Dari. The Islamic Army urged all fighters to “close the door on the so-called national reconciliation,” referring to Maliki’s plan to end the deadly sectarian violence engulfing Iraq.