Gunmen abducted a deputy governor of a central Iraqi province and two other senior Iraqi officials as they were heading for a meeting with Iraq's top Shia cleric, authorities in Tikrit said Saturday. Khatan Hamada, a deputy governor of the Salahudin province, was leading the three-member delegation which was stopped and kidnapped on Friday near Latifiyah, about 60 kilometres south of Baghdad, said Hamad Hummoud, the Tikrit-based governor of Salahudin. They were to meet Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf to discuss national elections scheduled for Dec 30. A house in northern Iraq was destroyed overnight in what residents said on Saturday was a US air strike that killed 14 people and wounded five. "I can confirm an air strike at 2 am (2300 GMT) Saturday south of Mosul. We are showing there were five deaths," a US military spokesperson said.A suicide bomber detonated his car at a petrol station near an Iraqi police and army checkpoint south of Baghdad on Saturday, killing four civilians and wounding 19, police said. They said most of those killed had been queuing at the fuel pump in the village of Mahaweel, about 80 km south of the capital, which was crowded amid chronic fuel shortages. Saboteurs blew up domestic oil and gas pipelines in northern Iraq on Saturday and crude exports through Turkey remained disrupted following an earlier attack, oil officials said. An explosion ripped off a section of an oil pipeline running from northern fields to the 350,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) Baiji refinery in the Safra area, around 70 km southwest of Kirkuk, they said. Saboteurs also blew up a gas pipeline in the Fatha area near Baiji. One civilian suffered burn wounds in the blast. US-led multinational forces have detained a key leader in the Muslim militant network in Iraq headed by Al Qaeda ally Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the US military said on Saturday.