Sources said four gunmen stormed the house of Abdullah Jassim Shakur Monday morning and beheaded him in the town of Sadiyah, north of Baghdad. The cleric’s son Mohammed says the gunmen took his father into a room, killed him and walked away with his head. “They returned an hour later with his head and attached it to an electricity post.”
Shakur, imam of Saadiyah’s mosque, had received several death threats from Al-Qaeda, who had demanded that he leave the town, home to Sunni, Shiite and Kurd populations.
In the second attack, according to the Diyala military officer, in the village of Al-Bushaheen, 20 km north of Baquba, gunmen burst into the home of Sheikh Hashim Arif at about 3 a.m., dragged him to his garden and shot him dead in front of his family. Arif was the imam of Bushaheen’s town mosque.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi appeals court on Monday rejected the disqualification of nine winning candidates from a March 7 election, removing another hurdle to the certification of the ballot results more than two months after the vote.
The decision effectively upholds a final vote tally that gave the Sunni-backed cross-sectarian alliance of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi a two-seat lead. His chances of forming a government are slim because of a tie-up between Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s group and another Shiite-led coalition.
A three-judge panel accepted appeals from the nine candidates, eight of whom ran for Allawi’s Iraqiya, against their disqualification by a special panel for alleged ties to Saddam Hussein’s banned Baath party, party officials said.
