Kidnappers killed an Egyptian working for the U.S. military in Iraq as a deadline loomed on Saturday for the execution of four Western peace workers, held under threat of death since they were seized two weeks ago.
Hours after the American ambassador in Iraq called for calm before next Thursday's election, candidates, campaigners and U.S. soldiers came under fire across the country.
A former mayor in the southern Shiite holy city of Najaf said he survived an assassination attempt when a roadside bomb went off near his convoy, while in Mosul, in the north, gunmen shot two members of another party as they put up election posters, killing one and wounding the other.
Four U.S. soldiers were killed in three separate attacks in and around Baghdad as the capital braced for an expected rise in violence ahead of the election — the first for a full-term parliament since Saddam Hussein was deposed.
Thousands of police and soldiers will be on the streets on Dec. 15 to try to ensure Iraqis can vote safely.
The dead Egyptian had worked as a translator in Saddam's home town of Tikrit before he was taken hostage this week.
Police said the man's body was found near a village north of Tikrit with his identity papers in his pocket.
Egyptian news agency MENA had earlier named him as 46-year-old Ibrahim al-Sayyid al-Hilali. He was the eighth foreigner abducted in Iraq since late November.
One other, a U.S. security contractor, has been killed, according to the Islamist group that seized him.
However, their claim, made in an Internet statement on Thursday, has yet to be independently verified.
A previously little-known group calling itself Swords of Truth says it is holding four captives — two Canadians, a Briton and an American — and said two days ago it would kill them by Saturday if its demands were not met.
It has called for the release of thousands of prisoners from Iraqi jails.
The British and American governments have said they will not negotiate with the kidnappers and nothing has been heard from the group for 48 hours.
The other two Westerners abducted recently are a female German archaeologist and a Frenchman who was dragged screaming from his home in Baghdad earlier this week.
Boiling point
The former mayor attacked in Najaf was Adnan al-Zurfi, an independent candidate in a city where political rivalry has boiled over in the run-up to the vote.
"On my way back to my party office, a roadside bomb exploded targeting my convoy, wounding three of my guards," he told Reuters, blaming two political rivals but refusing to name them.
Last Sunday, former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi survived what he said was an attempt to kill him in Najaf.
He and a group of supporters were chased out of the city's holiest mosque under a hail of rocks and shoes.
He told Reuters on Saturday his group had lost 11 members killed and about 20 wounded in two weeks.
Allawi, emerging as a credible threat to the Shiite coalition which governs Iraq, said one man tried to pull a gun on him but dropped it in the chaos.
Iraq's ruling Islamist coalition, which has the support of many in the majority Shiite community, is expected once again to be the biggest party in Iraq's new national assembly.
The Kurdish bloc, Allawi's list and two Sunni Arab coalitions are also expected to prosper.
Allawi launched a withering attack on the government's record at a meeting in Baghdad on Saturday.
"(It) does not know how to deal with terrorism and defeat it," he said, taking aim also at the pro-government militias which Sunnis accuse of running death squads against them.
"Instead, the government has allowed irregular militias to take control, which has led to an increase in killing, terrorism, abduction and mass murder."
His audience, many of them students and academics, responded at times with chanting and rythmic clapping for the charismatic leader who critics say has an authoritarian streak.
Allawi, who denies his slick media campaign is funded by Washington, has echoed U.S. calls for the next government to reach out to the disenchanted Sunni minority by pressing ahead with a deal to amend the constitution in the parliament.
But Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of SCIRI — the major Islamist force in government — told his followers Iraqis should be wary of any candidates who might tinker with the new constitution drawn up under the auspices of the Shiite-dominated government during the past year.
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