BAGHDAD, March 23: Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zobaie, a leading Sunni Arab politician, was wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a hall where he was attending Friday prayers.

The second assassination bid on a senior member of the Iraqi government in a month came as President George W Bush rejected pressure from the Democrat-led Congress to set a date for the US military to withdraw from the unpopular war.

Officials said at least six members of Zobaie's entourage were killed in the attack, which was later claimed by a militant group linked to Al Qaeda and which one of Zobaie's aides said was carried out by one of his own guards.

“He's wounded but it's not serious,” an official in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office told Reuters after Maliki visited Zobaie at the US military hospital in Baghdad's international Green Zone.—Reuters