DUBAI - The group of Al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for an attack Thursday in which a police colonel was gunned down in Baghdad, in a statement posted on the Internet.
"Your brothers in Al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers ... eliminated one of the leaders of the apostasy, Colonel Fadel Mohammad Mubarak al-Tai," it said in the statement, whose authenticity could not be verified.
"He was riddled with bullets by waiting youths as he left his Baghdad home in Jadida," it said.
The colonel, who worked at the interior ministry, was gunned down while leaving his home in the Al-Amin district, in the southeast of the capital, a security official in Baghdad said.
He "was shot several times and taken to Kindi hospital where he died", the official added.
The group led by Zarqawi, Iraq's most wanted man with a 25-million-dollar US bounty on his head, has claimed a string of devastating attacks as well as kidnappings since the April 2003 fall of the Saddam Hussein regime.
05/12/2005 15:01 GMT