SCIRI’s Hakim escapes assassination bid

At least 13 people killed in suicide car bombing near Baghdad office of top Iraqi Shiite leader.

BAGHDAD - Top Iraqi Shiite leader Abdel Aziz Hakim escaped with his life after a suicide car bombing at his office on Monday that killed 13 people, the interior ministry said.
The bombing was the latest attack against the country's majority Shiite community in the run-up to next month's crucial elections.
"Thirteen people were killed and 66 were injured and about 60 cars were destroyed," the interior ministry official said.
He said Hakim's offices had been badly damaged in the attack, with walls destroyed and windows blown out.
At least one car bomb exploded outside Hakim's party office in Baghdad, his son Mohsen Hakim said in Tehran, adding: "Thank God, Abdel Aziz Hakim and the other members of his family are safe and sound."
A spokesman for Hakim in Baghdad, Haitham al-Husseini, said three or four guards were killed in the attack while a medical source at a Baghdad hospital said one woman was killed and 24 others wounded.
Husseini confirmed the explosion was a suicide car bombing.
"We had an attack against our offices here by a suicide bomber. It seems he was trying to get through the main gate, but his vehicle exploded," Husseini said.
Husseini blamed toppled leader Saddam Hussein's old Baath party for the attack, saying: "It was elements of the old regime and other extremists trying to stop the political process in Iraq."
An interior ministry official said the car bomb exploded in the southeastern Jadriyah neighborhood of the capital, where Hakim lives in the former home of Saddam's deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz.
Hakim is the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a leading member of a Shiite coalition called the Unified Iraqi Alliance running in the January 30 elections.
SCIRI's founder, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr Hakim, the brother of Abdel Aziz, was assassinated in a car bombing that killed around 80 people in the Iraqi Shiite shrine city of Najaf in August 2003.
Twin bombings against the Iraqi holy Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf on December 19 killed a total of 66 people and wounded nearly 200.
Abdel Aziz Hakim lived for several years in exile in Iran where he headed SCIRI's former military wing, the Badr Organisation, before his return to Iraq.