A provincial police official says gunmen have shot and killed a prominent Sunni politician in Iraq's northern city of Kirkuk.
The deputy police chief in the city, Maj. Gen. Torhan Abdul-Rahman Youssef, said today that security forces were searching for suspects in the killings of councilman Moahmmed Khalil al-Jubouri and his wife late yesterday.
Youssef said al-Jubouri was traveling through the central Taseen neighborhood without guards when drive-by shooters opened fire.
Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered a "thorough and independent" investigation.
Ethnically-mixed Kirkuk is at the center of a struggle for power between Arabs and ethnic Turkmen and Kurds, who claim the area as their own and eventually hope to annex it to their self-rule enclave in northern Iraq.
