Gunmen wearing military uniforms assassinated the brother of Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president in his home Monday the third sibling the official has lost this year to the country's violence.

Also Monday, 11 Iraq soldiers were kidnapped in a brazen attack on a checkpoint in Sadr City, a Shiite district in Baghdad.

General Amir al-Hashimi, a Defence Ministry adviser and the brother of Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi, was killed by the gunmen who entered his north Baghdad home while wearing military uniforms, said Defence Ministry spokesman Brigadier Qassim al-Moussawi.

Insurgents have often targeted the families of prominent politicians in an apparent effort to intimidate the country's leaders.

The general's death came five months after the vice-president's sister and another brother were killed within two weeks of each other, both in shootings in the Iraqi capital.

Tariq al-Hashimi is Iraq's most prominent Sunni Arab political figure. In September, the vice-president urged Sunni-led insurgents to quickly join the Shi'ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's national reconciliation effort. Earlier, he had called for the insurgency to be put down by force.

Sunni politicians blamed the killing on the failure of al-Maliki's government to disband militias.

"We say to the government, you still did not disarm the militias," Sunni politician Salim Abdullah Tawfiq said in a statement read in parliament. "And here is what it has led to."

In Sadr City, gunmen jumped out of two vehicles and quickly seized all the soldiers on duty, said police Thaer Mahmoud.

The identities of the gunmen were unknown, but Sadr City is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia of radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It came a day after US and Iraqi forces said they killed 30 Mahdi Army fighters in a battle in the southern city of Diwaniyah.

On Sunday evening, 350 to 400 policemen suffered food poisoning at a meal at a base south of Baghdad, al-Moussawi said, denying a report that 11 officers had died.

It was not known whether the poisoning was accidental or intentional. Al-Moussawi said it was under investigation and "a number of people have been arrested, including the man in charge of the mess hall."

Sunni insurgents have not been known to use poison as a weapon against the security forces. The poisoned officers belong to the 4th Division of the National Police, whose officers are mainly Shi'ites.

Elsewhere, five police officers were killed Monday in separate attacks on Diyala Province northeast of Baghdad, officials said.

In the deadliest attack, police Ahmed Taha and another policeman were gunned down in Khalis. When a police patrol arrived, a roadside bomb exploded, killing two other police and wounding a third, officials said.

Also Monday, gunmen killed police Lieutenant Colonel Salih al-Karkhi in the Diyala capital of Baqouba, police said.

Witness accuses Saddam

Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein's forces buried a Kurdish family alive in a mass grave during a military operation against ethnic Kurds in the 1980s, a witness told the genocide trial of the ousted Iraqi leader Monday.

The court also heard grim testimony about conditions at Nugrat Salman, a desert prison facility in southern Iraq, where food shortages and polluted water caused many Kurds who had been rounded up and sent there to fall ill and die.

Two witnesses spoke about a black dog that dug up and ate the bodies of dead prisoners.

A Kurdish woman, sitting to the left of the judges and speaking from behind a curtain to protect her identity, was the latest witness to give testimony about Saddam's 1988 Anfal (Spoils of War) campaign against the Kurds in northern Iraq.

(China Daily October 10, 2006)