Gunshots ring out in a quiet district of the Iraqi city of Mosul, and with a screech of tyres masked gunmen make their getaway leaving another prominent figure lying dead on the street outside his home.
Witnesses' description of the December 28 killing of Adil al-Hadidi, a lawyer working with coalition forces, mirrored that of Sheikh Talal al-Khaledi, a local tribal head, and Youssef Khoshi, a chief investigative judge, shot dead by unknown assailants. All were killed in the same week.
With no arrests so far, police in Mosul, Iraq's third largest city set in the far north of the country, are tense and frustrated by the phenomenon.
"It's always the same thing: a drive-by shooting by masked men in a particular make of car," said a police officer stationed at the city's morgue where all the bodies were taken.
"It's turning into a ghost story."
The victims could have been targeted because of their links to the new administration in Iraq. Hadidi was the liaison officer between Mosul lawyers and the Coalition Appointed Attorney Programme, a development committee and training scheme sponsored by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority.
"He had to visit our offices frequently for this," said Gary Masapollo, a senior CPA official in Mosul.
"If you look at the killings of all three men, the common denominator between them is that they were part of the governing body in some form - but there is a wider programme of intimidation going on."
In fact, the killings are just the latest in a long line of high-profile assassinations going back for months, including a high court judge, a police colonel and a chief translator for the US military, among others.
According to police officials, the assassinations of prominent Mosul figures are scare tactics adopted by insurgents desperate to disrupt the progress the city has made.
"All of these people were attacked because they were soft targets," said Brigadier Hikmat Mahmoud, spokesman for the Mosul police directorate.
"It's an attempt to destabilise the situation here. Twenty of my police officers have also been killed - these people just want to hit the reconstruction effort."
But local journalist Roaa al-Zrary has a different explanation for the killings which she has been investigating since they began in October with the murder of outspoken newspaper editor Ahmed Showkat - her father.
"These are carefully chosen targets and they are killed in a very professional manner," she said. "What connects them is that they were either Baath party members who have started to work with the Americans, or they were involved with current operations against the Baathists."
Mosul, a mixed Arab-Kurdish city of about one million, was heavily Baathist under the former government, with more than 60 percent of the population members of the party.
Sheikh al-Khaledi was a member of the former president's national council in Baghdad and Khoshi was a judge for two years before the fall of the government, a position that would have required Baath party membership.
Zrary maintains her father was killed because he had discovered information about Baath party activists in Mosul, and that the subsequent killings are as much about settling party scores as intimidating "collaborators".
Mohammed al-Zibari, the director of the North Oil Distribution Company, can speak with experience about the impact of the killings on Mosul's officials.
In November, he survived an attempt on his life in which his son was killed. A week later, a police colonel in charge of protecting the company's facilities was gunned down outside his house. Then the fuel manager of the company was wounded in an assassination attempt.
"When we got our positions we knew there were risks to the job. We expect that to continue, but we promised to serve our country and will carry on as long as we're alive," Zibari said.
Coalition authorities say they are aware of the risks to those working with the administration in Mosul, but that the wider issue is the capability of the Iraqi police.
Nowadays, access to Zibari's office is blocked by a succession of armed police. Senior members of the local government move around the city only in heavily armed convoys, and fears are increasing about who the gunmen will target next.
"We can't work out why our colleague was killed, so now we are all scared for our own safety," said another judge at the court where Youssef Khoshi worked. He refused to give his name.
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