'Police terrorists' raid school and kill teachers in sectarian attack

Five Shia schoolteachers and a school bus driver have been killed in a Sunni-dominated village south of Baghdad, in an attack likely to heighten sectarian hostility. Uniformed policemen arrived at the village school near the town of Iskandariya at the end of classes and took the six men to a part of the school where there were no children and shot them.

"These men were terrorists in police uniforms," a police spokesman for Babil governorate said. But many Iraqis fear sectarian killers in uniform may indeed be police or army. The massacre of more than 100 Shia day labourers in a bomb attack in Baghdad last week infuriated many Shia but they are largely being restrained by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, their religious leader. He says that even if half of Iraq's 15 million Shia are killed there should be no retaliation against the five million Sunni.

The shift towards sectarian strife is being driven by a hard core of bigoted Sunni militants, commonly called Salafi, to whom the Shia are heretics as deserving of death as an American soldier. Sectarianism in Iraq is likely to deepen when the country votes on the draft constitution on 15 October.

The Sunni will either not vote or vote against it in a bid to stop the constitution by getting a two-thirds majority against in three provinces where they dominate. This will be followed by a further election on 15 December for the National Assembly in which the Sunni, unlike in January, will mostly participate.

In parts of Baghdad, civil strife has begun, with Shia being forced out of neighbourhoods in the south and west of the city. Sunni Arabs say the Badr Organisation, the military wing of the largest Shia party, is killing former Baathists.

In Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed at least 10 people, including seven policemen, at the entrance to the oil ministry in east Baghdad. The three others were in a bus carrying oil ministry employees, 22 of whom were wounded.