BAGHDAD, July 19: More than 20 employees of an organisation that looks after mosques in Iraq have been kidnapped by militiamen from another sect, their group said, as violence killed 25 people on Wednesday.
The administrators of the religious endowment were seized on Tuesday evening as they travelled home from work in the capital, the organisation’s spokesman Mahdi Mashhadani said.
Another official of the group said the kidnappers were wearing uniforms of the Iraqi security services.
He added that the organisation, which manages the affairs of mosques, would suspend its activities for the next seven days.
The Muslim Scholars Association issued a statement condemning the kidnapping by ‘known militias’ which ‘adds to their register of savage crimes’.
The statement added that the kidnappings had a ‘sectarian smell’.
President Jalal Talabani met the head of religious endowments to express his sympathy over the abductions.
He called on Iraqi clerics, Sunni and Shia alike, to take urgent action ‘to support a pledge against the shedding of Iraqi blood’.
UN representative Ashraf Qazi described the communal violence as a ‘catastrophe and a national tragedy for the people of Iraq’, and echoed the call for religious leaders to take rapid steps to rein it in.
The worsening violence has seen an average death toll of nearly 100 people in May and June, according to a United Nations report.
The seizure of the mosque administrators followed the killing of 54 people, mostly labourers, when a car bomb blew up in the centre of Kufa on Tuesday.
The past four days have seen almost 200 people killed in violence around Iraq, most of it sectarian-related.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki noted the fact that the attacks were outside Baghdad and other strife-prone areas was significant.
“These crimes do not indicate the power of Al-Qaeda but its weakness, as this network headed to these calm areas,” he said.
25 KILLED: In fresh violence Wednesday, 25 people died, including five civilians killed in a bombing outside the main courthouse in the northern oil city of Kirkuk.
Twelve people were also wounded in that blast, most of them staff of the court, police said.
Later in the evening two others were killed in a car bombing in Kirkuk.
In Baghdad, five people were killed and 20 wounded in a deadly combination of explosions targeting a police patrol and rescue workers, an interior ministry official said.
Gunmen opened fire on a store selling vegetables in the eastern neighbourhood of Baghdad Jadida, killing four people inside. They then set off explosives inside the store and killed another three people.
The head of the interior ministry’s justice office, Major General Fakhr Abdel Hussein, was shot dead outside his home in the capital’s upscale Mansur district.
North of Baghdad, in the town of Balad, gunmen burst into a woman’s home, shot dead her son, and wounded her.
Two brothers were also shot dead by gunmen in the nearby city of Baquba, capital of the confessionally mixed province of Diyala that has been a particular focus of the mounting violence.
In the western city of Fallujah, gunmen shot dead an officer with the old Iraqi army now working with the Sunni waqf (religious endowment). Police also found 19 bodies around Iraq on Wednesday, one of whom had been beheaded. —AFP
