BAGHDAD, Jan. 13 (Xinhuanet) -- An aide to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, was assassinated along with his son and four bodyguards on Wednesday night southeast of Baghdad, sources said Thursday.

   Sheikh Mahmud al-Madahaini, his son and four bodyguards were shot dead by unidentified gunmen as they were returning home from a mosque in Salman Pak after performing the evening prayers, the sources said.

   Madahaini is Sistani's representative in Salman Pak, an ancient town 20 km southeast of Baghdad.

   Another aide of Sistani, a cleric working in Sistani's office in Najaf, was also found dead on Wednesday. The name of the victim was not immediately known.

   The killings were apparently a fresh warning unleashed by insurgents to Sistani, who has been calling for restraint among the Shiite Muslims in an effort to turn their weight into a political one through the nation-wide elections.

   On Dec. 27, a suicide car bomber killed 13 people outside the Baghdad offices of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a major Shiite political party whose leader heads the main list of Shiite election candidates.

   With the planned Iraqi elections to have less than three weeks to go, violence still persists in the war-torn country where the US-Iraqi forces have been struggling to bring a bloody insurgency under control.  Enditem