Iraq MP murder 'mastermind' held

Al-Obaidi was killed at Shawaf mosque in Baghdad's Yarmuk neighbourhood on Friday [Reuters] Iraqi police have arrested an alleged al-Qaeda operative over the killing of a senior Sunni Muslim MP who was shot dead in a Baghdad mosque last week. The arrest on Wednesday came after intelligence efforts led police to a house in the western Baghdad neighbourhood of Ghazaliya, not far from Yarmuk, where Harith al-Obaidi was assassinated on Friday. "We received information from one of our sources in Ghazaliya that the group involved in the assassination was in one house," Brigadier-General Noaman Dakhil Jawad, the commander of the police's rapid intervention forces in Baghdad, told the AFP news agency. "We prepared our forces, we raided the house, and we arrested the criminal Ahmed Abed Oweiyed." Jawad said Oweiyed was the deputy commander of al-Qaeda's military wing in Iraq. "Through intelligence efforts, we tracked down the criminal who masterminded the killing," he said. A teenage assailant shot dead al-Obaidi and his bodyguard in Shawaf mosque in the predominantly Sunni neighbourhood of Yarmuk after al-Obaidi had led worship on the weekly Muslim day of prayer. The assailant then killed three others and wounded 12 by throwing a grenade into a crowd, before killing himself. Obaidi, born in 1966, was deputy chairman of parliament's human rights committee and head of the biggest Sunni bloc in parliament, the National Concord Front.