"Unknown persons killed one of our members in his house in Kirkuk on Saturday evening," party member Fares Abdelrahman told AFP.

"He was an opposition activist and he worked as a civil servant for the mayor of Kirkuk," he said.

Police Lieutenant-Colonel Baistoune Mohammed Qussabi told AFP that the murdered man, Anwar Mohiddine Rassul, had been shot in the head.

On December 18, Nahrla Hussein, a member of the same party, was found beheaded in her home in Kirkuk.

Hussein was a human rights activist and leader of the women's branch of the party.

In the 2005 parliamentary elections, the Kurdish Communist Party was part of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the largest political bloc in the Iraqi Kurdish parliament.

The assassinations come as Iraq is preparing for provincial elections on January 31.

Iraqi citizens from 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces will go to the polls to elect provincial councillors but Kirkuk is among the governates where the ballot has been postponed.

Oil-rich Kirkuk province, with 900,000 inhabitants, is ethnically mixed but the Kurds have demanded that it be added to their autonomous region in the country's north.

Chaldean-Assyrian Christians, who are considered the province's historical inhabitants, Turkmens as well as more recently migrated Arabs, oppose the move.