Gunmen killed a senior Oil Ministry official, Hussein Ali al-Fattal, after he left his house yesterday in the Yarmouk district of western Baghdad, police said. Fattal was the general manager of a state-owned company that distributes petroleum byproducts.
The violence served as grim reminder of Iraq's deteriorating security situation, which President Bush must address now that he has won his bid for reelection.
Radim Sadeq, an American of Lebanese origin who worked for a mobile phone company, was grabbed about midnight Tuesday when he answered the door of his home in Baghdad's upscale Mansour neighborhood, officials said. No group claimed responsibility.
It was the second abduction this week in Mansour, where many foreign companies are based. On Monday, gunmen stormed the two-story compound of a Saudi company, abducting six people, including an unidentified American, a Nepalese, a Filipino, and three Iraqis, two of whom were later released. No claim has been made for the kidnappings.
More than 170 foreigners have been kidnapped and more than 30 of them killed in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's regime fell in April last year. At least six of the foreigners were beheaded by followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who has sworn allegiance to Al Qaeda.
As the wave of abductions continues, another militant group, the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, posted a videotape on a website yesterday showing the beheading of a man it said was an Iraqi Army major captured in Mosul.
A statement by the group called Major Hussein Shanoun an ''apostate" and said he confessed to taking part in attacks against insurgents on orders of the Americans.
Just before his death, the victim was shown warning Iraqi soldiers and police soldiers against ''dealing with the infidel troops," meaning the Americans.
In another video, aired yesterday on Al-Jazeera television, a previously unknown group calling itself the Brigades of Iraq's Honorables said it beheaded three Iraqi National Guards, accusing them of spying for the Americans.
The broadcast showed three men holding up what appeared to be army identification cards sitting in front of a hooded man who read a statement.
