Iraqi gunmen kill 6, capture 1

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Gunmen killed a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric, along with the aide's son and four bodyguards in a town south of Baghdad, an official in the cleric's office said Thursday.\nInsurgents trying to derail Iraq's Jan. 30 elections appeared to be sending a message to al-Sistani, who strongly supports the vote. Insurgents have targeted electoral workers and candidates.\nGunmen opened fire on a minibus picking up a Turkish businessman from the Bakhan Hotel in central Baghdad on Thursday, killing six Iraqis and kidnapping the Turk, who reportedly ran a construction company that worked with U.S.-led occupation authorities.\nIraq's interim President Ghazi al-Yawer also weighed in on the U.S. announcement Wednesday that the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has concluded without finding any evidence of the banned weapons that President Bush cited as justification for going to war against Iraq.\nAl-Yawer, in Paris for talks with French President Jacques Chirac, said the war still served a purpose.\n"What has happened has happened," he told reporters, speaking in English. "But the war rid Iraq of a vicious regime which established a dynasty of villains."\nSheik Mahmoud Finjan, al-Sistani's representative in the town of Salman Pak, 10 miles southeast of Baghdad, was shot dead Wednesday night as he was returning home from a mosque where he performed the evening prayers, the official said on condition of anonymity.\nThe aide's son and four bodyguards also were killed, the official said at al-Sistani's office in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.