Unknown gunmen killed in separate attacks in northern Iraq a senior police officer and a former member of the Baath party, police said on Wednesday.
Police General Hikmat Mahmud Mohammad was shot dead by three men in an Opel car as he left his house at 7:30 am (0430 GMT) in Mosul, Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Azel Hazem Khafudi told AFP.
In the other incident, Anfel Ilah al-Anaz, a general in Saddam Hussein's army, was assassinated and his son badly injured in Mosul on Tuesday at 10:00 pm (1900 GMT) when gunmen pulled up in a white Opel and riddled his car with bullets, said Police Major Makram Zakariah.
Anaz was hit in the chest and back, while his son, a former intelligence officer, was hospitalised, Zakariah added.
Elsewhere, US forces announced they killed an aide to Musab al-Zarqawi - suspected of being Osama bin Laden's top operative in Iraq.
US Army Major General Charles Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, said Tuesday that his troops raided a "terrorist safehouse" belonging to the Jordanian-born Zarqawi in the town of Al-Ramadi, located west of the capital Baghdad.
Zarqawi, a suspected al Qaeda activist, has a 10-million-dollar bounty on his head. He is the prime suspect behind deadly bombings in Iraq's holy city of Najaf and at the UN offices in Baghdad.
Soldiers hit the site on February 19, killed one of his operatives and arrested others, he said.
A top US military occupation officer, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, identified the slain man as Abu Mohammed Hamza, an explosives expert and one of "Zarqawi's lieutenants".
Meanwhile, the United Nations is confident a "broad spectrum" of Iraqis agree that elections are impossible before the June 30 transfer of sovereignty to a caretaker government, a top UN envoy said Wednesday.
Lakhdar Brahimi, who authored a UN report on Iraq released this week, said his fact-finding team met with between 400 and 600 Iraqis during its mission, and he felt no strong opposition to delaying elections until late this year or early next year.
"The impression we had was that we very conclusively demonstrated to them that no credible elections are really possible before the 30th of June," Brahimi told reporters at the Japan National Press Club. "The impression we had was that all our interlocutors - and there were hundreds of them - agreed with us."
The UN report released earlier this week recommended the formation of an interim government to assume sovereignty, but warning that it would take at least eight months to properly prepare for elections.
That conclusion has frustrated leaders of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, who had been leading the campaign for an early vote, and it left open the question of how provisional government will be created.
Brahimi suggested accounts of that frustration were overstated, saying that his team met with a wide range of Iraqis - including groups excluded from the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) - and did not find significant opposition to the plan.
However, Brahimi also warned that Baghdad's history in recent decades did not lay a solid groundwork for holding perfect elections. He said the Iraqis therefore were hoping for elections that would be "acceptable."
"I don't think that they are aiming at the best, the freest, the fairest elections as could be held," Brahimi said, according to The AP. "They are hoping for an election whose results will be considered as reasonably acceptable to the large majority of the people." (Albawaba.com)
© 2004 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
