BAGHDAD, Iraq — A Sunni Muslim official was abducted and killed as he returned from a trip to persuade a Shiite Muslim leader to support delaying Iraq's Jan. 30 election, Iraqi officials said.

The body of Ali Ghalib, the head of the provincial council for Salahuddin province north of Baghdad, was found riddled with bullets last night on the highway between Baghdad and Najaf.

Relatives of Ghalib said insurgent contacts relayed word to them that Ghalib had been kidnapped by al-Qaida in Iraq, a group headed by Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi. The contacts said Ghalib was being interrogated and faced execution if he was found to be helping make elections successful.

Ghalib was abducted on the road Friday afternoon while returning to Tikrit from Najaf, where he had sought to persuade Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, to support a six-month delay in the nationwide ballot, according to Shuaib Dujaili, a Tikrit official who had been traveling on the same road.

The fate of three Iraqis — the deputy dean of Tikrit University's law school, another official and their driver — accompanying Ghalib could not be determined.

"I was driving on the same road last night and I saw the gunmen stop them and put weapons in their faces," said Dujaili, an employee of the Tikrit health directorate. "I was about to go and tell the armed men that these are good people in order to save them, but my friend sitting next to me said: 'Don't be a fool. Do you want them to kill us?' "

Ghalib had traveled to Najaf on behalf of Sunni political leaders who argue that violence in their areas — much of it carried out by Sunni insurgents intent on thwarting an election that will likely hand power to the country's Shiite majority — will prevent many Sunnis from voting.

Past arrests of insurgents revealed

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq's interim government and the U.S. forces that support it issued a flurry of statements yesterday announcing the capture of men described as insurgent leaders. Most of the arrests occurred weeks and even months ago.

The government said it captured a former commander in the Iraqi Republican Guard, Hamid Ismail Darwish, 51, in late October. An insurgent leader named Mohammed Fanjo was captured in December after trying to hijack a truck, according to a government statement that said "the one-armed man" had specialized in intimidation.

And Iaa Aldin Majid, a second cousin and former bodyguard to Saddam Hussein, was captured in Fallujah in early December. The government said he funded insurgents and directed attacks on oil pipelines and electric installations.

The U.S. military said it captured Abdul Aziz Sadun Ahmed Hamduni, described as a senior official in Zarqawi's group in Mosul, on Dec. 23.

U.S., Sunnis discuss issues of election delay

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A senior U.S. Embassy official met yesterday with members of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a powerful Sunni Muslim group that has demanded the Jan. 30 national assembly election be delayed and has threatened a boycott.

Embassy spokesman Bob Callahan would not identify the U.S. official, but said it was not Ambassador John Negroponte.

Arab television Al-Jazeera reported that Harith al-Dhari, the association's general secretary, asked the United States to announce a timetable for withdrawing its forces from Iraq.

Callahan would not say if that was discussed, but it is unlikely the United States would consider such a request.

ALSO

A car bomb exploded yesterday near a roadblock manned by Iraqi police and soldiers in Mahaweel, killing four civilians and wounding 19 who had been waiting in line for fuel at a nearby gas station.

Gunmen tried to assassinate Majid Atamimi, a Basra government official and candidate for the national assembly, when he left the governor's office to head home. He escaped, but his four bodyguards were killed.

In Baghdad's western Khadraa neighborhood, gunmen shot dead Abboud Khalaf al-Lahibi, deputy secretary-general of the National Front for Iraqi tribes, A bodyguard also was killed.