By Aseel Kami

By Staff
|
Google Oneindia News

BAGHDAD, May 26 (Reuters) Gunmen have killed the coach of Iraq's national tennis team and two of his players while they were driving through Baghdad, Ministry of Interior and police sources said today.

It is not clear why Hussein Rasheed and the two players, Nasir Hatem and Wissam Ouda, were shot on Tuesday in a country where violence is based mostly on sectarian motives or carried out by insurgents, criminal gangs or tribes.

Victims have included everyone from young children to labourers lining up for work to top government officials facing a rebel campaign of bombings, shootings and kidnappings and sectarian tit-for-tat killings.

Police sources said gunmen in a car blocked the three on a street and opened fire.

Iraq's athletes, who rarely travelled abroad during long years of United Nations sanctions under Saddam Hussein, looked forward to international competitions and better funding after a U S-led invasion toppled the president in 2003.

Many were also relieved because Saddam's feared son Uday, who athletes said tormented and physically abused them when they failed at competitions, was removed from the picture.

He and his brother Qusay were killed when U S soldiers stormed their house in the northern city of Mosul in 2003.

But athletes are paying a new price in postwar Iraq's chaos.

Iraq's government is hoping to secure the release of 15 members of a martial arts squad who were kidnapped in an insurgent stronghold region west of Baghdad this month.

Gunmen abducted the tae kwondo experts near the city of Ramadi as they were travelling by bus to neighbouring Jordan to attend a training course, an official of the Youth and Sports Ministry said.

Their driver was also seized.

A ransom was paid to help free Iraq's Olympic Committee Director-General Teres Odesho after he was kidnapped north of Baghdad last year.

Thousands of Iraqis and more than 200 foreigners have been kidnapped since 2003.

REUTERS SHR BST1942

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