BAGHDAD, Nov 17 (Reuters) - Gunmen shot dead a leading member of Iraq's most powerful Shi'ite political party and his wife as they were driving through western Baghdad on Saturday, police and a party official said.

Ali al-Adhadh represented the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) in Geneva for many years before returning to Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, fellow SCIRI member Adnan al-Obeidi told Reuters.

Obeidi said Adhadh was a member of SCIRI's Shura council, the central decision-making body of the party that now dominates the Shi'ite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Adhadh was shot dead close to his home at the intersection of the Yarmouk and Mansour districts, in the heart of mainly Sunni west Baghdad, police said.

Despite his seniority within SCIRI and the lawlessness gripping the capital, he appeared to have been travelling without bodyguards.

Adhadh, born in 1952 in Iraq's southern Dhi Qar province, was the most prominent SCIRI member to have been killed since the organisation's leader Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim was blown up in an explosion that killed scores outside the Imam Ali mosque in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf in August 2003.

Obeidi said the party had planned to put Adhadh forward as the next Iraqi ambassador in Geneva, a post once held by Saddam's half-brother Barzan who was this month sentenced to death along with the former president for crimes against humanity committed against Shi'ites.

Adhadh was a ministerial adviser in the government of the previous prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

His death came against the background of continuing sectarian bloodletting between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunnis once dominant under Saddam, and a relentless Sunni insurgency that seeks to topple the Shi'ite-led government.

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