FALLUJAH, Iraq, 30 April 2003 — US troops shot dead 13 Iraqis including children at a pro-Saddam Hussein rally, witnesses said yesterday. US commanders said the shooting was in self-defense, without confirming the death toll.
The former governor of the southern Iraqi city of Basra handed himself in to US-led forces, the 15th member of Saddam’s collapsed regime wanted by US forces to fall into coalition hands, following the arrest of a top weapons adviser.
Witnesses in the town of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, told AFP that US troops had opened fire late Monday on demonstrators marking Saddam’s birthday, killing 13 and wounding 45.
“The shooting broke out when 500 protesters carrying portraits of Saddam and Iraqi flags approached a school manned by US troops,” said resident Mohammed Hamid.
Another witness, who asked not to be identified, said six of those shot dead were children aged just seven or eight. They were buried yesterday. The US troops were “not threatened by the demonstrators,” he added.
Lt. Yvonne Lukson at US Central Command said US forces “came upon a group of Iraqis that fired AK-47s at them and they returned fire.” Another US officer, Maj. Gen. Gene Renuart, said: “The reports we had were a small number of wounded, less than 10, and I have no reports of any killed.”
Fallujah hospital director Ahmed Ghanim Al-Ali said 13 people had been killed.
The shooting came amid highly volatile anti-US feeling in the country, nearly three weeks after US tanks rolled into central Baghdad to end Saddam’s 24-year grip on power.
Two more senior members of Saddam Hussein’s old guard were in American hands yesterday. US forces said they were holding the ousted president’s veteran oil minister, Amir Muhammed Rasheed, whose wife is bioweapons scientist Rihab Taha, widely known as “Dr. Germ”.
The Iraqi National Congress political party said another wanted official - Basra city governor Walid Hamid Tawfiq Al-Tikriti - had given himself up and was being questioned by US officials in Baghdad.
Their capture means the Americans now hold 15 of the 55 most-wanted members of Saddam’s administration. Rasheed is the third key weapons specialist to fall into coalition hands, following the head of the body that liaised with UN arms inspectors, Gen. Hossam Mohammad Amin, and presidential scientific adviser Amer Al-Saadi. All three are crucial to finding the elusive “smoking gun” - evidence to back up Washington’s claims that Iraq was developing banned weapons.
In another development, a previously unknown Iraqi group opposed to the US presence said Saddam would deliver a message to his country within three days. “President Saddam Hussein was not killed. He is still alive. He is going to address a message to Iraqis and to the (Arab) nation within 72 hours,” the group calling itself Iraqi Resistance and Liberation said in a letter published by the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi.
