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Official kidnapped, journalist slain
AN Iraqi official has been kidnapped and a journalist for a pan-Arab television station was killed in insurgent attacks that also saw four Iraqi policemen killed.The four police were killed and two others were wounded when a roadside bomb blew up near their convoy in the restive Sunni Muslim city of Samarra, north of Baghdad. Insurgents have been waging a bloody campaign against the country's security apparatus, killing more than 35 people in suicide attacks over the past two days. Abdel Hussein Khazaal, a correspondent with US-funded pan-Arab television station Al-Hurra was killed by unknown attackers in the southern city of Basra. The victim, aged in his 40s, was also a member of the Shiite political party Dawa. In other violence, the oil ministry's representative to the interior ministry Colonel Riad Allawi was kidnapped in Baghdad, officials said. The US army said its troops killed an insurgent near Balad, north of the capital, as he was planting a bomb Tuesday. In the north of the country, a gas pipeline linking the oil hub of Kirkuk to the Baiji refinery was damaged by a rocket attack, a source at the North Oil Company said. On Monday, insurgents had launched a similar attack in the same area, blowing up a pipeline conveying crude from Kirkuk to Baiji refinery, which is key to much of Baghdad's power supply. According to the Iraqi government, attacks on the country's oil infrastructure have cost Iraq seven to eight billion dollars in exports since the March 2003 US-led invasion. Posted by: God Save The World 2005-02-09 |
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