BAGHDAD, 26 June 2003 — Iraqis said yesterday that anger over weapons searches in private homes triggered the killing of six British soldiers and the wounding of eight others in clashes around this southern town this week.
But a British military spokesman in Iraq, Lt. Col. Ronnie McCourt, said the killing of the six military police in Majjar on Tuesday was unprovoked, adding: “It was murder.”
The British soldiers, training local police, were killed inside a police station, McCourt said near Amarah, 350 km southeast of Baghdad. He gave no other details.
In the second incident, seven troops were wounded when a helicopter was fired on as it went to aid a military convoy under attack. British forces denied they had issued a 48-hour ultimatum to local Iraqis to hand over the killers of the soldiers.
In a village near Barwanah, 250 km northwest of Baghdad, an explosion damaged an oil pipeline which supplied a refinery and a power plant in the capital, an official from Iraq’s Northern Oil Co. told AFP yesterday.
In another development, a report in the London’s Daily Mirror newspaper said yesterday Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf, Iraq’s information minister at the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime, has been captured in Baghdad.
In Baghdad, neither the top civil administrator in the Iraqi capital, Paul Bremer, nor an official US military spokesman was able to confirm Al-Sahaf’s arrest.
