Sunni Clan Mourns Slain Leader

BAGHDAD — More than 200 members of Iraq’s Batta clan on Friday protested the slaying of their leader, a respected Sunni sheik, and a little-known Sunni group said a deadly car bombing was retaliation for his shooting.

The clan members gathered at a mosque in the capital’s northwest, carrying banners and chanting slogans demanding the resignation of the defense minister over the slaying Wednesday of Sheik Kadhim Sarhid Hemaiyem.

One of the sheik’s brothers said gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms broke into the family home, killing Hemaiyem, three of his sons and his son-in-law. A spokesman for the Interior Ministry denied that government forces were involved.

“We want the Arab League and the Sunni scholars to investigate,” said Abdullah Jawad Kadhim Battawi, a relative.

In the Shiite city of Hillah, 11 people were killed and 17 were wounded in a car bombing Thursday . A statement from the little-known group Partisans of the Sunni claimed it had carried out the assault in retaliation for the slaying of Hemaiyem and other attacks against Sunnis.

“We have warned the [Shiites] to stop assassinations and detentions and torture,” said the statement, which was posted Friday on an Islamist website.

In sermons Friday, several Sunni preachers spoke against sectarian violence and urged followers to vote in next month’s elections to increase the minority’s influence in the government.

“We condemn and reject all kinds of violence and terrorism that is taking place in our country to kill our people,” Sheik Mahmoud Sumaidaie said at Baghdad’s Umm Qura Mosque. “I regret that some religious figures still remain silent in the face of what is going on.”

An Interior Ministry official said security forces were aware of the Partisans group, which has been active south of Baghdad for months. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the media, said authorities suspected that the same group also was behind a suicide car bombing Thursday near a hospital in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, that killed 30 people.

The Partisans statement did not mention the Mahmoudiya attack.

Also Friday, a prosecutor in the trial of deposed President Saddam Hussein said that a key witness in the case had died of cancer but that his testimony already had been taped for presentation in the proceedings, which are to resume Monday.

Wadah Ismail Sheik died Oct. 27, four days after talking to court officials, said Jaafar Mousawi, the main prosecutor. Sheik was a senior intelligence officer at the time of the Dujail massacre in 1982 in which Hussein and seven others are charged.