TUNCELI, Turkey, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Unidentified gunmen killed a prominent Kurdish
official in the breakaway region of northern Iraq on Sunday, Kurdish television said.

Fransu Hariri, governor of the city of Erbil and a senior member of Massoud Barzani's
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), was shot to death in an ambush on his car, satellite TV
channel Medya TV said.

Erbil, some 350 km (200 miles) north of Baghdad, serves as Barzani's capital.

Hariri's bodyguard also died in the attack, and his driver was wounded, Medya TV said.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack.

Northern Iraq has been beyond Baghdad's control since the end of the 1991 Gulf War. A
U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement in 1998 led to a drop in fighting between the KDP and
Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

But the fragile peace between the rival factions is threatened by separatist Turkish Kurdish
rebels, who withdrew from southeastern Turkey into Iraq.

Abdullah Ocalan, the condemned leader of the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), ordered his
fighters to leave Turkey after his capture and death sentence two years ago.

The United States and Britain patrol a no-fly zone over northern Iraq from an airbase in
southern Turkey.

Ankara has sent soldiers into the region to combat the PKK and has pledged technical
support to both the KDP and the PUK.
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The Kurdistan Observer
www.kurdistanobserver.com