BAGHDAD - Baghdad and Tehran pledged to improve security in Iraq, turning the page on years of war and rivalry, as another Iraqi general on Wednesday became the latest victim of a wave of insurgent attacks.
An Australian negotiator, meanwhile, raised hopes that hostage Douglas Wood, 63, may soon be freed, saying he has received a phone call from an unidentified man claiming to represent Wood's captors.
The Australian contractor could be freed within 24 hours, Sheikh Taj Eldin Al-Hilali, who flew to Iraq to try to negotiate the contractor's release, told Australian radio.
The sheikh also handed over vital medication for Wood, a spokesman for Sydney's Muslim community said.
"The strongest bit of news that we have at the moment is that the medication has changed hands, the mufti (Al-Hilali) has given this medication to be taken to Mr Wood and this is a very good sign," Keysar Trad said.
Assailants in Baghdad gunned down Ibrahim Hamas, a brigadier general at the interior ministry, as he left his home around 9:00 am (0500 GMT), an interior ministry official said.
His wife was also injured in the attack in Zafraniya in southern Baghdad.
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi was to meet Wednesday with Hajem Hassani, Iraq's Sunni parliamentary speaker, on the second day of his visit, the first since the downfall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Tuesday he had no doubt that Kharazi's visit "will open up significant new horizons for cooperation between the two countries.
"Post-Saddam Iraq is a new Iraq, at peace with its neighbours, far removed from its bellicose predecessor," he said.
Kharazi assured his counterpart that the clerical Shiite regime in Iran would not interfere in its neighbour's affairs.
"It is in Iran's interest to support by all possible means the Iraqi government. It is not in the interest of any of Iraq's neighbours to see the current situation continue because it would have negative consequences on the entire region," he said.
Kharazi's visit, just two days after that of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, highlights the warming of ties between the two neighbours who were at war from 1980-1988.
US President George W. Bush meanwhile called former Iraqi interim prime minister Iyad Allawi to thank him for "his leadership and courage" during his time in office.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that Bush told Allawi he "deserves credit for much of the progress that Iraq made during that time."
The US support came against a backdrop of increasing tension between majority Shiites and previously dominant Sunni Arabs in Iraq, where a series of tit-for-tat killings has raised the spectre of a sectarian war.
Three of the country's top Shiite figures -- Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, radical cleric Moqtada Sadr and Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari -- have warned against retaliation after the gruesome discovery earlier in the week of 46 mutilated bodies and the killing of both Shiite and Sunni clerics.
In other violence Wednesday, two Iraqi policemen were killed in a suicide car bomb around 3 am (2300 GMT) near the oil refinery town of Baiji about 200 kilometres (125 miles) north of Baghdad.
The deaths followed those of at least eight other Iraqis on Tuesday. In addition, the Iraqi army found the bodies of two Iraqi contractors near Sharkat, 300 kilometres (180 miles) north of the capital.
A roadside bomb also killed one US soldier and wounded another north of Baghdad on Tuesday, bringing the American death toll to 25 over the past 11 days.
In the United States, military policewoman Sabrina Harman, 27, who set up the picture of a hooded prisoner on a box with wires attached to his hands, was sentenced to six months in jail.
It was the latest development in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal which has cast a long shadow over the US venture in Iraq.
05/18/2005 08:10 GMT