March 6, 2003	Thursday	Muharram 2, 1424

SULAYMANIYA (Iraq), March 5: Five members of one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s mainstream religious parties were gunned down at a local checkpoint on Tuesday in an apparent case of mistaken identity.

Mullah Abdullah Qasri, a deputy leader of the Komala Islami Kurdistan (Islamic Society of Kurdistan), was shot dead on Tuesday along with three of his bodyguards and his driver by militia from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the faction that controls the eastern part of the rebel-held north.

PUK officials said Qasri and his entourage were apparently mistaken for members of Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam), a hardline group allegedly linked to the Al Qaeda and responsible for a string of attacks against the secular PUK.

“We had received information that Ansar were planning an attack, so our peshmerga (militia) were on high alert. It seems the car did not stop and that is how the shooting started,” a PUK security official explained.

Four other people were injured in the shootout — at a busy checkpoint around 12 kilometres from Sulaymaniya — including a PUK counterterrorism official, a customs official, a teacher and a nine-year-old girl, local security officials said.

PUK officials said the shooting of the Komala leader was “regrettable”, but insisted that the shooting was still under investigation. However, the faction’s chief, Barham Salih, said that if any PUK guards had overreacted they would be “dealt with accordingly”.

However, Komala officials attending the funeral of the five on Wednesday accused the PUK of failing to distinguish between Iraqi Kurdistan’s mainstream and underground radical parties.

A party member close to Qasri said the dead leader had in the past frequently passed through the checkpoint where the incident took place without stopping his car, as the guards at the post could easily recognize him.

—AFP