Iraq probes murder of 3 Sunni clerics, 5 January 2015

Iraqi officials condemn incident which they say aims to escalate sectarian violence in Iraq

The Iraqi Ministry of Interior announced on Sunday new information on the killing of three Sunni clerics in Basra, southern Iraq on Thursday.

The investigation showed that one of the martyrs had been threatened before as he called ISIL a terrorist organization in a Friday prayer sermon, the ministry said.

Meanwhile, Salim al-Jabouri, the Sunni speaker of the Iraqi parliament, arrived at Basra -- a city with a Shiite majority -- with a parliament delegation on Saturday to follow up the investigations, officials said.

The Sunni speaker of Council of Representatives of Iraq, Jabouri visited the Sunni Endowment Diwan -- a Sunni non-profit governmental organization -- for talks with officials about the incident.

Also, the Iraqi Commission for Human Rights -- a governmental organization -- called for protection of religious clerics.

“Violation of human rights on the basis of right to life and belief is an attempt to raise the sectarian violence among the Iraqi people,” Dham al-Azawi, a member of the commission, said in a press conference in the Iraqi parliament on Sunday.

Also Salih al-Haydari, the chief of the Shiite Diwan, told AA that ISIL was trying to put the blame on Shiites for the killing of the Sunni clerics.

Three Sunni clerics had been killed and another had been wounded in an unknown assailant’s attack on Thursday. The assailant had targeted the Sunni clerics while they were in their car in Bab al-Zubair area in Basra, southern Iraq.

Iraq had witnessed sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites in 2006-2007.

Iraq has been gripped by a security vacuum since June 2014, when ISIL stormed the northern province of Mosul and declared what it called a "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria.

Source http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/178128/iraq-probes-murder-of-3-sunni-clerics.html