An American journalist has been found shot dead in Basra four days after he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times criticizing the spread of Shi'ite Islamist fundamentalism in the southern Iraqi city.

Witnesses said Steven Vincent and a translator were kidnapped by gunmen after leaving a hotel on Tuesday evening. His body was found later that night, a US diplomat said.

His death appeared to mark the first targeted killing of a Western journalist in Iraq since the US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Other reporters have been killed after being swept up in the violence plaguing the country, but were apparently killed for being Westerners rather than because they were journalists.

"An investigation has been launched to determine who was behind this," said the US diplomat.

A nurse in a Basra hospital said Vincent, a freelance investigative journalist and art critic from New York City who had been working in Basra for several weeks, was shot three times in the chest.

Photographs from the morgue showed a red cloth around Vincent's neck and plastic handcuffs on his wrists, suggesting he had been blindfolded and bound.

"Steve, Hay al-Rebaat," said an Arabic tag identifying Vincent and the area of central Basra where his body was found.

His Iraqi translator, Nouriya Ita'is, was hit by two bullets in the chest and two in a leg but was in stable condition, her sister said.

The New York Times opinion piece criticized the failure of British forces to clamp down on what Vincent described as a city that was "increasingly coming under the control of Shi'ite religious groups, from the relatively mainstream... to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr."

The article also focused on the Basra police force, quoting a police lieutenant as saying a few officers were perpetrating many of what he said were hundreds of assassinations of mostly former members of Saddam's Ba'ath Party each month.

Source: China Daily