Baghdad, Iraq ? Gunmen firing from a car killed Iraq’s deputy foreign minister Saturday in the first assassination of a senior official since the new interim government was announced this month. Iraqi authorities blamed Saddam Hussein loyalists.

Bassam Salih Kubba, 60, the slain minister, was Iraq’s most senior career diplomat and was slated to stay on in the new administration that takes over after June 30 from the U.S.-led occupation authority.

Kubba was mortally wounded when gunmen drove up behind his car in the city’s Azimiyah district and opened fire, Foreign Ministry spokesman Thamir al-Adhami said.

The assailants then passed the stricken vehicle and fired a second time, the spokesman said. Kubba’s driver escaped injury, but Kubba died in a hospital.

Azimiyah is a predominantly Sunni Muslim neighborhood where Saddam took refuge as American forces overran the city in April 2003 and support for the former regime runs strong there.

The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the attack “bears all the hallmarks of leftover supporters of Saddam Hussein’s evil regime.”

Kubba was the second senior Iraqi figure to be killed in the last three weeks and the first since U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi appointed the new leadership to take power June 30.

Izzadine Saleem, who at the time headed the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council, was killed May 17 in a suicide car-bombing near the entrance to the heavily fortified Green Zone headquarters of the American-run occupation authority.

Ten days later, gunmen ambushed the convoy of another Governing Council member, Salama al-Khafaji, south of Baghdad, killing her son and her chief bodyguard.

A security officer at the foreign ministry in Baghdad, Iraq, inspects the bullet-riddled car in which deputy foreign minister Bassam Salih Kubba was assassinated. Saturday's slaying of Kubba, Iraq's most senior career diplomat, was the second assassination of a senior Iraqi figure in the past month.

The American-educated Kubba had served at the United Nations and as Iraq’s ambassador to China before his appointment to manage legal and multilateral affairs at the ministry. He was part of a committee that managed the Foreign Ministry after the collapse of Saddam’s regime.

U.S. authorities had warned of escalating violence in the run-up to the sovereignty transfer as insurgents seek to undermine public confidence in the new administration. The Americans hope that the establishment of a sovereign Iraqi government will take the steam out of the insurgency, allowing security to improve so that balloting for an elected administration can be held by the end of January.

Although the Iraqis will run their own affairs after June 30, about 150,000 U.S. and other coalition troops will remain in the country to held improve security under a U.N. resolution approved unanimously by the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday.