Gunmen kill Iraqi policeman and brother

Attackers grabbed a Sunni Arab policeman and his brother and shot both of them dead outside their home to the south of Baghdad today.

In another attack, a roadside bomb in the Iraqi capital killed one policeman and wounded two others, officials said.

In the southern city of Najaf, Shiite Adil Abdul-Mahdi, one of Iraq’s two vice presidents, said that about 100,000 families have been forced to flee their homes nationwide because of continuing violence.

He said 90% of them were from the majority Shiites population and the rest from the country’s Sunni minority.

Other estimates of the number of displaced families have been lower.

For example, on Friday, Dr Salah Abdul-Razzaq, spokesman of the Shiite Endowment, a governmental body which runs Shiite religious institutions, put the number of displaced families at 13,750 nationwide, or about 90,000 people.

That includes 25,000 Iraqis who have fled their homes since an attack on a Shiite mosque in Samarra on February 22 triggered a wave of sectarian attacks on Sunni mosques and clerics.

Meanwhile, attacks in Iraq continued.

In the Sunni-dominated town of Jurf al-Sakhar, 43 miles south of Baghdad and near the mostly Shiite city of Musayyib, gunmen kidnapped a Sunni policeman and his brother from their home early this morning, lined them up outside and shot them dead.

About the same time, a roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi police patrol exploded in Ghazaliyah in west Baghdad, killing one policeman and wounding two.