Mosul - The leader of an Arab tribe in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul has been fatally shot, police reported. Police sources said unknown gunmen killed Sheikh Farhan Falah Mohammed Yunis on Monday night in the district of 17 Tamuz, west of Mosul, in Iraq's ethnically divided Nineveh province.
Sheikh Farahan was the leader of a local Arab tribe and an important politician with the Hadba List, the Arab nationalist coalition that won January's provincial council elections in Nineveh on a platform of taking control of the province from Kurdish parties.
Those Kurdish parties swept to power in Nineveh's local government after a Sunni-Arab boycott of the last provincial polls in 2005.
Nineveh is among the most ethnically and religiously diverse provinces in Iraq. Almost every day, deadly bomb attacks and shootings have made its capital, Mosul, and the area around it, among the most dangerous places in Iraq, despite successive security pushes aimed at fighting Sunni insurgents in the area.
Earlier on Monday, four civilians and two policemen died in a blast that targeted a police patrol in the southern Mosul neighbourhood of al-Ghazlani.
Police said they had earlier detained four suspected members of al-Qaeda in Iraq who are wanted on charges of planning bomb attacks against police officers in and around Mosul, roughly 400 kilometres north of Baghdad.
