BAGHDAD, Dec 16 (AFP) - Campaigning for the first post-Saddam Hussein elections got under way Thursday amid more bloodshed, as the ousted president met his family-appointed lawyers for the first time since his capture a year ago.
Ahead of next week's start of the trials of his lieutenants, Saddam's defence team based in Amman said after the meeting with a lawyer that he appeared to be "in good health".
Osama bin Laden, meanwhile, added fuel to the ongoing insurgency with a call for his Islamist fighters to focus their attacks on oil facilities in Iraq and the Gulf, in a new purported audiotape message.
"Take jihad (holy war) to stop (the Americans) getting hold of (the oil). Concentrate your operations on the oil, in particular in Iraq and the Gulf," said the voice on the tape attributed to the Al-Qaeda leader.
And as the death toll from Wednesday's blast outside a revered Shiite shrine rose to 10, fanning fears of sectarian violence ahead of the January 30 elections, a top telecoms official was gunned down in Baghdad.
And an Islamist group in Iraq claimed it had killed an Italian hostage identified as Salvatore Santoro, Al-Jazeera television reported, saying it had a videotape.
Italy's foreign ministry had said one of its nationals may have been kidnapped and killed, but there was no confirmation and the embassy in Baghdad refused to comment.
An Iraqi photographer said insurgents had shown him an unidentified man's body in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, and an Italian's passport.
After Iraq's Defence Minister Hazem Shaalan accused Syria and Iran of orchestrating terrorist attacks, US President George W. Bush warned the two neighbours that meddling in Iraq was "not in their interest".
A Syrian foreign ministry official, quoted by the state news agency SANA, rejected the charges.
"The repetition of these invented accusations, by certain people, show the will to hide the real reasons behind the deterioration of the situation in Iraq," he said.
Iraqi authorities and US-led forces are struggling to cope with the deadly insurgency ahead of the first multi-party polls in Iraq in half a century.
The bomb blast outside one of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines in the central city of Karbala killed at least 10 people and wounded 40, medics said, in an apparent attempt to fan intercommunal tensions.
And the director of Iraq's state-run telecommunications company and a bodyguard were killed by armed men Thursday as they left his home in Baghdad.
Senior officials working for the Iraqi interim government and members of the country's fledgling security forces have been the target of relentless attacks by insurgents.
Two national guards and a police captain were reported killed in separate rebel attacks north of the capital in Baaquba and Mosul on Wednesday, and another policeman killed in a bomb attack near Tikrit on Thursday.
Three policemen from the southern port city of Basra were killed by masked gunmen Wednesday on the outskirts of Baghdad as they headed home from training in the capital, said an officer who survived.
In Fallujah, the US military said continued fighting with rebels in the battle-scarred city was preventing its inhabitants from returning home, more than a month after a massive US-led assault began there.
The pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat announced the temporary closure of its Baghdad office after receiving threats against journalists from an armed group.
Voters are to choose 275 delegates to the national assembly, whose task will be to draft a permanent constitution and oversee a government to replace the interim line-up picked in June by the now defunct US-led occupation authority.
A total of some 6,400 candidates on around 100 lists have been registered for the vote, according to final figures.
Posters lining Baghdad streets were the only real sign of political campaigning in the country, with no party yet having announced any rallies or meetings, as violence continued to rock the country.
As campaigning kicked off, the interim government announced it would begin trials of top officials of Saddam's ousted regime as early as next week.
Investigative hearings into the cases are also due to begin, the special tribunal set up for the trials said, without specifying a timetable.
Saddam will be the last to go on trial, "long after" the elections, Justice Minister Malek Dohan al-Hassan told a Swiss newspaper.
Hassan criticised US policy and the elections, which he said were being organised in "a climate of fear" and "under a banner of blood".
He accused Washington of wanting the outcome of the polls to produce a strong opposition and a weak coalition government. "This would allow them to continue to pull the strings" of power, he said.
12/16/2004 15:28 GMT - AFP