Baghdad: A sister of Iraq's new Sunni Arab vice president was killed in a drive-by shooting in Baghdad on Thursday, police said.
In southern Iraq, a bomb blast rocked an Italian base on Thursday, killing at least two people, Italian news agencies reported. The bomb exploded in the city of Nasiriyah, the agencies ANSA and Apcom said, citing Italian government sources. Al-Jazeera TV said four Italians were killed. More than 2,000 Italian troops are stationed in Iraq.
The violence came as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were visiting Baghdad to meet with officials in the new Iraqi government.
Mayson Ahmed Bakir al-Hashimi, whose brother, Tariq al-Hashimi, was appointed by parliament as vice president on Saturday, was killed by unidentified gunmen in a BMW sedan as she was leaving her home at 8 a.m. with her bodyguard in southwestern Baghdad, said police Capt. Jamel Hussein. The bodyguard, Saad Ali, also died in the shooting, Hussein said.
It was the second recent killing in Tariq al-Hashimi's immediate family. On April 13, his brother, Mahmoud al-Hashimi, was shot while driving in a mostly Shiite area of eastern Baghdad.
On Thursday, two of the vice president's brothers, one an army officer, raced to the scene to recover the bodies of their sister and Ali, Capt. Hussein said.
The television station Baghdad, close to the vice president's Iraqi Islamic Party, showed home photos of Mayson al-Hashimi, a woman in her 50s wearing an orange headscarf, and footage of her bullet-riddled white SUV, while playing mournful music.
It was not immediately possible to contact the vice president. An official reached by telephone at the headquarters of the Iraqi Islamic Party in Baghdad declined to comment.
The party is one of three major Sunni political groups in the Iraqi Accordance Front which won 44 seats in the Dec. 15 parliamentary election.
On April 17, the brother of another leading Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlak, was found dead in Baghdad after he was kidnapped.
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VP against insurgents
Thursday's killings came as Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite hard-liner recently tapped as Iraq's prime minister, is trying to form a new national unity government aimed at stopping a wave of sectarian violence in Iraq.
Al-Malika has 30 days to assemble a Cabinet from divided Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties. The most contentious question will be filling key ministries that control security forces amid demands to purge them of militias blamed for the rise in sectarian bloodshed.
On Wednesday, Vice President al-Hashimi had made a show of unity with his Kurdish and Shiite colleagues, calling for Iraq's insurgency to be put down by force.
Al-Hashimi shrugged off a videotape by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, widely seen on TV Tuesday, during which the al-Qaida in Iraq leader tried to rally Sunnis to fight the new government and denounced Sunnis who cooperate with it as ''agents'' of the Americans.
''I say, yes, we're agents. We're agents for Islam, for the oppressed. We have to defend the future of our people,'' al-Hashimi said at a news conference with President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and his fellow vice president, Shiite Adil Abdul-Mahdi.
Al-Hashimi, Talabani, Abdul-Mahdi met with Rica and Rumsfeld on Wednesday.
Thursday's killings raised to 110 the number of Iraqi civilians or police who have been killed in insurgency- or sectarian-related violence since al-Maliki was tapped as Iraq's prime minister designate on Saturday and asked to form a new government.
On Wednesday, a bomb ripped through a minibus carrying passengers to their Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, killing four people. They were among at least 12 Iraqis killed in violence in Iraqi on Wednesday. Police also found 11 bodies dumped in the Iraqi capital and elsewhere, the apparent victims of sectarian killings.
On Tuesday, U.S. troops backed by a helicopter and jets struck a suspected safe house of foreign insurgents, killing 12 militants and a woman in a raid near the site where an American helicopter had crashed, the U.S. military said.
Rice and Rumsfeld are hoping that Sunni participation in a new national unity government in Iraq led by al-Maliki will undermine the country's Sunni-led insurgency as well as reduce Shiite-Sunni violence that has flared in the past two months.
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