A prominent Sunni lawmaker was assassinated outside a mosque after Friday prayers in western Baghdad, officials said. Harith al-Obeidi, who led the main Sunni bloc in parliament, was shot dead as he was walking from the al-Shawaf mosque to his nearby home in the former stronghold of Yarmouk, police and a fellow lawmaker said, according to the AP.
This incident came a day after Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki warned that violence was expected to intensify ahead of a June 30 deadline for American forces to withdraw from urban areas as well as the national elections that are set for the end of January.
Al-Obeidi's party is the Congress of the People of Iraq, one of three parties making up the Iraqi Accordance Front, the main Sunni bloc in parliament. A spokesman for the Accordance Front, Salim Abdullah, said the gunman was on foot and acting alone.
