NAJAF, Dec 4: A crowd hurling shoes, rocks and tomatoes forced former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to cut short a visit on Sunday to Iraq’s holiest Shia shrine during a campaign trip to the city of Najaf, police officers said.

A spokeswoman for Allawi, a secular Shia, said she had no information on the incident but confirmed that Allawi, who is challenging the ruling Shia Islamist Alliance bloc at next week’s parliamentary election, had been in Najaf during the day.

A police captain, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a large crowd of worshippers at the Imam Ali mosque hurled sandals and shoes at Allawi — a grave insult in Iraqi culture.

A second police officer said some of Allawi’s bodyguards fired in the air to disperse the crowd and that also threw rocks, sticks, tomatoes and other projectiles. Police also intervened to break up the disturbance, he said.

Both policemen said they believed supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr were responsible for the disturbances, though evidence for this was unclear.

“When Allawi entered the shrine, a few people, believed to be Sadrists picked up batons and threatened to attack him,” the police captain said at the scene after the incident.

“His American and Iraqi guards fired in the air when everyone started throwing shoes and sandals at him.”

Other witnesses were unclear as to how far armed bodyguards had accompanied Allawi into the shrine or whether he was accompanied by Westerners, normally barred from such shrines.

On Saturday, Allawi, whose promises to crack down on violence and religious militias have won backing across Iraq’s sectarian divide, traded accusations with the ruling Islamists as the campaign heats up for the Dec 15 parliamentary vote.

Allawi, who spent three decades in exile working partly with British and US intelligence after breaking with Saddam Hussein and his Baath party, was named prime minister in mid-2004 by US occupation authorities.

He stepped down in April after a January election gave a majority to his Islamist rivals.

—Reuters