April 27, 2005 - (NYTimes) Three men with pistols shot to death an Iraqi legislator today at the front gate of her home here in a brazen daylight attack that marked the first assassination of any of the 275 members of the parliamentary body elected on Jan. 30, the Iraqi police and the victim's neighbors and family said.

The slain legislator, Sheikha Lamea Khaddouri, a member of the party of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and a high-profile human rights activist, was gunned down about 3:30 p.m. in the Shiite neighborhood of Binouq, in eastern Baghdad, where she lived with her brothers in a modest home amid olive trees set back from a wide street.

Ms. Khaddouri, one of 90 women in the national assembly, had survived two previous assassination attempts, one when she was fired upon as she was parking in a garage, and another when gunmen attacked her as she was driving in the capital, destroying her car. She had moved from house to house in Baghdad in an effort to foil further attacks.

According to the accounts of a bodyguard and one of her neighbors, Ms. Khaddouri had just been dropped off today at the driveway that leads to her front gate. She walked through the five-foot-tall black iron gate and closed it behind her. As she made her way to her front door, the three pistol-wielding killers hopped out of their maroon Opel Omega sedan and knocked on the gate. One called her by her name.

"They knocked at her gate and she went back to open it, and then she got shot directly," First Lieutenant Sabah Sahr of the Quds police station, said. Ms. Khaddouri suffered eight bullet wounds to her face and chest, he said.

Ms. Khaddouri's bodyguard, interviewed later at the police station, said he had driven his car away after dropping Ms. Khaddouri off. He said he soon heard gunfire, but said he had not thought Ms. Khaddouri could have been the target because she he assumed she was on her own property. In the interview, the bodyguard, who would not give his name to a journalist, said she might have mistaken the man calling her name for the bodyguard.

Earlier in the day, Ms. Khaddouri had been interviewed on television, according to her brother, Amar abd al-Khaddouri, a dentist. "She was always afraid to be on TV," he said.

The security guard said that after she finished the interview, she said, "I'm afraid they will kill me because I've been on TV."

Ms. Khaddouri, who was in her 40's and single, often read the Koran and shunned living in the relatively protected Green Zone in favor of sharing a home with her brothers. Ms. Khaddouri was given the honorific of Sheikha because she was the daughter of a prominent Shiite leader of the Rabiya tribe, which is based in Kut, 100 miles south of Baghdad. She had only recently begun using security guards paid for by her family, according to her brother.

One neighbor, a 17-year-old who would only identify himself as Husam, said, "When she was elected to Parliament, I said, `Why don't you have better security?' And she said, `God will protect me'."

One longtime friend and fellow assembly member said that Ms. Khaddouri's friends had told her that her bodyguards were too young and that she needed better protection.

"They chose her as a target because she spoke out and took little care who she criticized," the friend, Haifa el-Azawi, said. "She was a brave woman and she was talking a lot about the situation."

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/international/middleeast/27cnd-baghdad.html?