Baghdad - Parliament in Iraq on Monday voted to give its
speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani a 'long vacation' and gave the Sunni
Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF) one week to name his replacement, a news
report said.
In Monday's session 113 members of parliament voted for the move
which comes after al-Mashhadani's bodyguards assaulted a deputy
without any interference on the speaker's part.
They decided to leave First Deputy Speaker Sheikh Khaled Attia in
charge of parliament's affairs, pending the naming of a replacement,
an Iraqi parliament media source told the independent Voices of Iraq
news agency.
The IAF, the party that nominated al-Mashhadani, a Sunni Muslim,
is the bloc that is authorized to name a substitute for al-
Mashhadani, Kurdistan Coalition member Mahmoud Othman told the news
agency.
The Kurdistan Coalition is the second-largest bloc in the 275-seat
Iraqi parliament, with 55 seats. The IAF has 44 seats, making it the
third-largest.
The IAF, of which al-Mashhadani is a member, had asked to be given
24 hours to consider the matter, Othman added. The party appointed
him speaker of the first elected Iraqi parliament about a year ago.
Al-Mashhadani's bodyguards allegedly beat and verbally attacked
Friad Mohammed Omar, a member of parliament from the Shiite Unified
Iraqi Coalition (UIC), the largest bloc in parliament with 115 seats,
while he was passing near al-Mashhadani at the parliament's entrance
gate.
Sheikh Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, a leading figure in the Shiite
Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC) and member of parliament from
the UIC, said the IAF had the right to replace al-Mashhadani and name
a replacement.
The UIC inside the parliament is determined to have al-Mashhadani
changed. The incident was not the first time his bodyguards have
assaulted deputies, said Saghir, noting 'the bodyguards had beaten
two members of parliament belonging to the UIC before.'
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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