Gunmen stormed the home of the brother of Iraq’s Vice-President today, killing him and several of his guards as well as abducting his son.

As violence spiralled in Iraq, another group of armed fighters overran an army checkpoint in Sadr City, the Baghdad stronghold of the deadly Mahdi Army, and kidnapped 11 government troops.

And up to 1,300 policemen were poisoned in a training camp in the Shia area south of Baghdad, with reports of up to seven deaths. Officials said four cooks had been arrested, although the mass sickness was believed to have been the result of poor quality rations and corruption rather than an act of terrorism.

The murder of Lieutenant-General Amr al-Hashemi, the brother of Tariq al-Hashemi, the Iraqi Vice-President, was the third deadly attack on the family of Iraq's most prominent Sunni politician. His sister, Maysoun, was gunned down in April in a drive-by shooting that also killed her bodyguard. Two weeks earlier, his brother Mahmoud was also shot dead.

Mr al-Hashemi has been denounced by Sunni extremists for allying himself with the Shia-dominated government backed by Washington, but in the daily blur of violence of Baghdad it was unclear whether the general might have been target by Shia death squads, criminal gangs or foreign terrorists.

Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Prime Minister, blamed the killing on "criminal gangs" but a Sunni politician blamed the deaths on Shia militias nominally under the control of the main Shia parties that make up the fractious government.

"We say to the government, you still did not disarm the militias," Salim Abdullah Tawfiq said in a statement read to the national assembly. "And here is what it has led to."

General al-Hashemi had been installed by the US-led coalition as the first chief of staff of Iraq’s newly rebuilt army in 2004, when sovereignty was restored to an Iraqi government. In June 2004, The Times accompanied him as he was introduced to his British-trained troops in the south, meeting officers and men and recalling proudly that he was the grandson of the first general to command Iraq’s newly formed national army in 1921.

He was replaced months later, and was working as an advisor to Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi President, when he was murdered in his home near Addumiyah, a Sunni nationalist district of northern Baghdad. The men who entered his home and shot him were wearing military uniforms, Iraqi officials said.

The general died in a spasm of violence that shook the city today, with a heavily armed gang of gunmen abducting 11 government troops at a checkpoint in Sadr City, the fiefdom of the rabidly anti-coalition cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. His Mahdi Army controls the vast slum of two million inhabitants. The mass kidnapping came a day after one of his spokesman threatened nationwide upheaval in retaliation for a US raid on a Sadr-controlled town in the south in which 30 militiamen were killed.

A pregnant woman was also killed right outside the Green Zone government compound in central Baghdad when men in police uniforms fought a gun battle with army troops. Last week, an entire police brigade was suspended for alleged ties to militias and death squads.

In the army and police training camp of Numaniyah, near the town of Kut to the south of Baghdad, hundreds of policemen were poisoned after eating rotten meat at the base’s mess hall. The defence ministry said around 400 were affected, but officers at the base said around 1,300 fell sick just after eating a meal on Monday night to break their daily Ramadan fast.

Iraq staff inside the base accused senior officials of skimming more than 50 percent off the mess hall budget and providing poor quality food to the recruits. They said the local hospital was overwhelmed by victims of the mass poisoning, in a case reminiscent of the graft and poor rationing prevalent in Saddam Hussein’s army.

A number of people were arrested, including the man in charge of the mess hall, said a ministry spokesman, adding that the mess halls were operated under a contract to an Australian company which subcontracted to an Iraqi firm.

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