Kidnappers killed an Egyptian working for the US military in Iraq as a deadline loomed on Saturday for the execution of four Western peace workers, held under threat of death since they were seized two weeks ago.
Hours after the American ambassador in Iraq called for calm before next Thursday's election, candidates, campaigners and US soldiers came under fire across the country.
A former mayor in the southern Shia holy city of Najaf said he survived an assassination attempt when a roadside bomb went off near his convoy, while in Mosul, in the north, gunmen shot two members of another party as they put up election posters, killing one and wounding the other.
Four US soldiers were killed in three separate attacks in and around Baghdad as the capital braced for an expected rise in violence ahead of the election - the first for a full-term parliament since Saddam Hussein was deposed.
Thousands of police and soldiers will be on the streets on December 15 to try to ensure Iraqis can vote safely. The dead Egyptian had worked as a translator in Saddam's home town of Tikrit before he was taken hostage this week.
Police said the man's body was found near a village north of Tikrit with his identity papers in his pocket. Egyptian news agency MENA had earlier named him as 46-year-old Ibrahim al-Sayyid al-Hilali.
He was the eighth foreigner abducted in Iraq since late November. One other, a US security contractor, has been killed, according to the Islamist group which seized him.
However, their claim, made in an Internet statement on Thursday, has yet to be independently verified.
A previously little-known group calling itself Swords of Truth says it is holding four captives - two Canadians, a Briton and an American - and said two days ago it would kill them by Saturday if its demands were not met.
It has called for the release of thousands of prisoners from Iraqi jails. The British and American governments have said they will not negotiate with the kidnappers and nothing has been heard from the group for 48 hours.
The other two Westerners abducted recently are a female German archaeologist and a Frenchman who was dragged screaming from his home in Baghdad earlier this week.
The former mayor attacked in Najaf was Adnan al-Zurfi, an independent candidate in a city where political rivalry has boiled over in the run-up to the vote.
Allawi launched a withering attack on the government's record at a meeting in Baghdad on Saturday.
"(It) does not know how to deal with terrorism and defeat it," he said, taking aim also at the pro-government militias which Sunnis accuse of running death squads against them.
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