An Iraqi journalist investigating the infiltration of Basra's police force by extremists from the Shia militia was abducted and killed by masked men who identified themselves as police.

Fakher Haider, a 38-year-old Shia Muslim reporter covering Basra for The New York Times, was found dead with his hands bound and a bag over his head in a deserted area on the city’s outskirts yesterday morning.

On Sunday, Haider filed reports about the angry demonstrations that followed the arrest by British forces of two high-ranking members of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the hardline Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

Shortly after midnight, two cars - one unmarked, the other a police car - were driven up to his apartment building. Three men, carrying AK-47 assault rifles, ransacked the flat removing mobile phones and videotapes.

Haider, a father with three children aged 5, 7and 9, told his wife not to worry as he was led outside and bundled into one of the waiting vehicles.

Hours later, she was called to identify his body at the city morgue. He appeared to have been shot more than once in the head. His back was bruised, suggesting he had been beaten.

In recent months, Haider had confided to friends that he was worried about the increasingly violent atmosphere in Basra. In July, gunmen in a pick-up truck chased his car and fired at him - he escaped after driving off-road and firing his pistol into the air, he told a friend.

Many of Haider's most recent photographs, showing British military vehicles targeted in Basra, had been published on the ironically-titled They Love Us Really website which highlights the difficult relationship between locals and the coalition forces.

Among the images is a chilling picture of US consulate workers loading the body of Steven Vincent, a freelance journalist attached to the New York Times who was executed in Basra last month, into the back of an ambulance.

Vincent, too, had been inquiring into the extent to which the police force in Basra had become a tool of Shia extremists. Their deaths have taken on an enhanced political significance with the breakdown of relations between the local police force and British troops based in the city following yesterday's prison ram-raid.

British military officials, however, have stated that they believe Islamist militants, and not Iraqi police, are to blame for his death.

According to Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, he is the 68th journalist killed in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003 and the 19th this year.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, said: "This murder of a respected colleague leaves us angry and horrified. Fahker was an invaluable part of our coverage for more than two years. His depth of knowledge, his devotion to the story and his integrity were much admired by the reporters who worked with him."

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