Former Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, was attacked by a mob during a campaign visit on Sunday to the Shiite holy city of Najaf, police officials said. He escaped unharmed and later characterized the attack as an assassination attempt.
The confrontation in Najaf began as Allawi, a Shiite who heads a secular coalition of Sunni and Shiite leaders, arrived at the gold-domed Imam Ali mosque, said Major Muhammad Ali, chief of the government's antiterrorism bureau in Najaf. A crowd hostile to Allawi gathered outside as he went into the shrine, Ali said.
As Allawi left, the mob threw stones, dirt and shoes at his entourage, and his guards fired their assault rifles into the air to disperse the crowd, police officials said. Television showed Allawi's entourage sprinting out of the mosque toward waiting cars as bursts of automatic gunfire sounded.
On his return to Baghdad, Allawi said that the situation was worse inside the mosque, the holiest shrine in Shiite Islam. He told Sharqiya, an Arabic-language television station, that as he was praying, he was surrounded by more than 50 men armed with pistols and knives, one of whom fired his weapon at him.
"The man who tried to shoot me didn't control the pistol well because he looked scared and because of the good luck, so nobody was hurt," he told the television station.
But Colonel Najah Yassir, commander of the city's emergency security force which helped protect Allawi's entourage, denied that anyone had entered the shrine with weapons. Islamic tradition forbids weapons inside mosques, and the Imam Ali mosque is tightly controlled by a special guard force supervised by an arm of the national government.
Allawi was prime minister when US troops laid siege to Najaf in August last year to wrest control of it from the militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, which inflicted hundreds of casualties among al-Sadr's followers and left much of the city in ruins.
In his comments to Sharqiya, Allawi said the gunmen inside the shrine were from a militia, which he did not name, an assertion that pointed toward al-Sadr's armed wing, the Mahdi Army. Fahab al-Ameri, a spokesman for al-Sadr in Najaf, denied that his organization had any contact with Allawi's entourage.
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