Gunmen in army uniforms have seized a senior local official and prominent member of a Sunni Islamist party from his Baghdad home, police and security sources said yesterday.

In a sign of the breakdown in security occurring in and around Baghdad, 15 people, including an entire Shi’ite family, were found shot or beheaded, according to police and medical sources.

It was not clear if Riyadh al-Adhdah, who heads Baghdad’s Provincial Council and belongs to the Sunni Islamist Iraqi Islamic Party, had been kidnapped by militiamen, who often wear military outfits, or detained by the authorities.

A police official speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed that men in army uniforms had taken Adhdah on Friday night.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki‘s military spokesman was not immediately available for comment on the incident.

Security in Baghdad has been breaking down as sectarian tensions deepen. The lightning advance of Sunni militants through northern Iraq last month has raised fears that Baghdad will be violently carved up along sectarian lines.

Adhdah had previously faced terrorism charges but was not convicted due to a lack of evidence. Sunni politicians have long accused Maliki‘s security forces of targeting them on false terrorism-related charges in a witch-hunt.

Tensions between Sunnis and Shi’ites are increasingly at the forefront of the violence in Iraq, threatening to fragment the country, a major OPEC oil producer.

Gunmen beheaded a Shi’ite family of five in their home in the town of Taji just north of Baghdad, police and medics said.

Security forces, meanwhile, retrieved the bodies of six young men in military trousers who had been handcuffed and shot in their heads and chests in Taji, security sources said.

In eastern Baghdad, security forces found four corpses of men who had been handcuffed, blindfolded and shot execution-style, security sources said.