BAGHDAD, Dec 29: Fourteen Shia men and women were gunned down on Wednesday in an area south of Iraq’s capital known as the ‘triangle of death’, as a US soldier died in a bomb blast and a Lebanese was kidnapped in Baghdad.

On the political front, the International Mission for Iraqi Elections announced it was sending assessors to Iraq to help investigate complaints of fraud in the Dec 15 general election, while Shia and Kurdish leaders — whose lists topped the polls — held talks on setting up a government.

In the latest outbreak of violence, 14 people, believed to be from a single Shia family, were found shot to death in their home in Mahmudiyah, south of the capital.

“Armed men broke into their home and their bodies were then taken by minibus to a police checkpoint in Latifiyah,” a security official said.

In the capital, a US soldier was killed by a roadside bomb, bringing the overall US military death toll in Iraq to 2,172.

In other incidents, attacks targeting the nation’s security forces continued on Thursday when a suicide bomber blew himself up near the interior ministry in Baghdad, killing four policemen and wounding five. Since the election, there has been a steady rise in guerilla attacks, especially against Iraqi security forces.

Over 120 Iraqis have been killed in violence over the past seven days.

KIDNAPPING: The foreign ministry in Beirut announced that one of its nationals, an engineer named as Camille Nassif Tannus, was kidnapped in Baghdad, and French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy appealed for the release of a French hostage threatened with execution.