01 October 2004	Friday	15 Shaban 1425

KIRKUK, Sept 30: The top Kurdish bodyguard for the mayor of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq was found dead Thursday after being tortured, beaten with an axe and shot, police said.

Also in northern Iraq, a Sunni Muslim cleric was shot dead in the city of Mosul, police said, in the latest in a series of such killings of religious figures. The body of Jalal Fattah Omar, a top aide and security guard for Kurdish mayor Abdul Rahman Mustapha Zengana, was found in a northern district of Kirkuk, a tense melting pot of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen.

Fattah was kidnapped, tortured, axed in the stomach and head, and shot in the mouth, police and medical officials said. He had two bodyguards with him who are being interrogated over the gruesome murder, police said.

The city has been riven by tension as rival groups compete over which is the dominant community. Once harmonious relations were strained by former dictator Saddam Hussein's policy of Arabisation in Kirkuk that saw Kurds and Turkmen evicted from property and Arabs, mainly Shiites, resettled in their place.

Meanwhile, Sunni religious leader Rajeh al-Ramadani of the Al-Azhar district in Mosul was gunned dead on the street by assailants in a speeding car. Two religious scholars were killed in Baghdad on September 20 and three officials from the main Shia political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, were also shot dead this month. -AFP