BAGHDAD, May 10: Feuding among Iraq’s sectarian factions erupted in parliament on Wednesday, as a scuffle over a mobile phone and an attack on the speaker’s bodyguard served to highlight the violence lurking behind talks on a new government.

Angry words between the Sunni speaker and a Shia woman member about the telephone incident — featuring a controversial religious ringtone — led to a walkout, a television blackout and the speaker revealing the hit squad shooting of his guard.

With Sunnis and Shias still at odds over forming a unity government that might end communal bloodshed, the friction has broad implications and lawmakers were keen afterwards to play down speculation that Tuesday’s attempt to kill the speaker’s bodyguard might be linked to Monday’s rumpus over the phone.

Sources in the dominant Shia-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, however, said radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr threatened to have his followers shun the coalition being formed by fellow Alliance leader Nuri al Maliki in response to the speaker’s guards beating an aide to a pro-Sadr member of parliament to silence her telephone.

Sadr stopped short, however, of demanding the speaker step down. The election last month of Mahmoud al Mashhadani, a former military officer and physician, was part of a complex sectarian geometry to share out top jobs, including president and prime minister, before forming a grand coalition government.

So any challenge to him could upset a process that has taken five months since December’s election and is not over yet.

Nevertheless, so incensed were Alliance lawmakers by the scuffle in the lobby of parliament on Monday, as well as by perceived Sunni bias on the part of the new speaker, that they were ready to give Mr Mashhadani a rough ride at what was only the second full, normal sitting of parliament since the election.

But, Alliance sources said, many preferred to cool tempers and shelve their protest when he told them his chief bodyguard had narrowly survived a shooting in Baghdad the previous day.

The member of parliament whose ringing telephone started the week’s controversy said she was satisfied with a promise of a full investigation into the incident.

Gufran al-Saidi, a veiled Sadr supporter, said that Mr Mashhadani’s guards beat one of her aides when her phone, being held by the aide, went off loudly — twice — as Mr Mashhadani was filming a television interview in the lobby of parliament.—Reuters