Iranian casualty is buried

BAGHDAD — A senior Iranian diplomat was murdered in Baghdad Thursday as an Iranian delegation traveled to the holy city of Najaf to mediate with a renegade cleric despite US objections, fueling tensions over Iran's influence in Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim population.

Khalil Naimi, the first secretary of the Iranian embassy in Baghdad, was shot in the head and killed while driving back to the embassy, just a stone's throw from the entrance to occupation headquarters. Bullet holes lined the side of the car in what appeared to be a targeted assassination.

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi, blamed the murder on a climate of "chaos and bloodshed" in Iraq caused by America's "childish and destructive" policies, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

"The only solution to the issue is for the occupation forces to pull out from Iraq and let the Iraqi people administer their own affairs," Asefi told IRNA.

The Islamic Republic of Iran - the giant theocracy along Iran's eastern border - has cast a long shadow over Shi'ite politics here, and the specter of an Iranian-style government here has helped drive the US effort to promote democracy among Iraq's Shi'ite majority and cultivate clerics who believe in electoral politics. Thursday's events brought to the surface many of the concerns that have troubled the United States and some Iraqi officials since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government last year.

Iran wants to play an active role in its neighbor's future; an overwhelmingly Shi'ite country ruled by clerics, it hopes to create a strong ally in Iraq, the only other large majority Shi'ite country in the Muslim world.

US officials suspect Iranian agents of arming and funding Shi'ite militants inside Iraq, including the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. They have accused Iran of allowing fighters to infiltrate the Iraqi border, and of working with extremist wings of Shi'ite parties long tied to Tehran to sow instability in Iraq.

The Iranian delegation is ostensibly trying to broker a peaceful resolution to the standoff between Sadr's militia and US forces around Najaf, the city an American commander in the theater likened to the Vatican of Shi'ism. But US officials denied statements from Tehran that the delegation was invited to help negotiate a peaceful resolution.

"This issue with Sadr and his illegal militias has to be solved by Iraqis, and not Iranians," Dan Senor, a spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the US administrator of Iraq, said Thursday.

Senor pointedly refuted published news reports quoting Iranian officials, who said they had been invited by British officials - with American consent - to mediate a peaceful settlement between Sadr and the US-led occupation. He also denied wire service reports that quoted an anonymous State Department official, who told the Associated Press on Wednesday that the United States was aware of the Iranian group's trip to Iraq.