Baghdad: Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has vowed on to capture the assassins of an anti-American Shiite MP, the first lawmaker to be killed in 18 months, and ordered a top-level investigation.

Maliki said yesterday he appointed a panel headed by Interior Minister Jawad Bolani to probe the assassination of Saleh al-Ogayly, 41, in Baghdad's Sadr City district, a Shiite stronghold. "We reaffirm our determination to get at the hotbeds of terrorism and crime and arrest and prosecute the killers and bring them to justice," the prime minister said in a statement yesterday.

The Sadrist MP became the first Iraqi legislator to be killed since the April 12, 2007 suicide bombing of the national parliament, where one lawmaker and seven others died.

The assassination was strongly condemned by US ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Raymond Odierno, the commander of US forces in Iraq. "This heinous crime was not just an attack against Dr al-Ogayly. It was an attack against Iraq s democratic institutions," Crocker and Odierno said in a joint statement. "We call on all sides to resolve their differences with dialogue and negotiations through national institutions."

The latest bombing marked a spike in violence at a time when US and Iraqi officials are saying bloodshed is at a four-year low.

Ogayly was among eight people killed in fresh attacks in yesterday and around Baghdad. The lawmaker was killed when home-made bomb on a parked motorcycle blew up, also killing a bystander and wounding four people, security officials said. Ogayly, a father of five children, was a member of the parliamentary group of radical anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Source : PTI