BAGHDAD, 14 September 2003 — Mourners burying 10 Iraqi policemen in Fallujah killed Friday by “friendly fire” from American troops called for revenge as the town seethed with anger yesterday.

Hundreds of people chanted “America is the enemy of God” and fired in the air at the funeral of the policemen who were apparently shot by US troops who mistook them for anti-American rebels.

In an ominous message, Fawzi Namiq, the imam of Fallujah’s main mosque, said through loudspeakers: “Save your bullets for the chests of the enemy.”

More than 36 hours after the deaths, the US military apologized for what it called an “unfortunate incident” in Fallujah, west of Baghdad.

“We wish to express our deepest regrets to the families who have lost loved ones,” military spokesman Lt. Col. George Krivo said in Baghdad, promising a high-level investigation.

Mourners crammed the mosque where the corpses were kept and local police had to fire warning shots in the air to disperse demonstrators when the first coffin was carried to a cemetery.

Religious leaders issued a “Declaration by the people of Fallujah” condemning the deaths, announcing three days of mourning, and calling for a general strike today.

The policemen who survived the shootout in the small hours of Friday recounted how they begged the American soldiers to stop shooting, screaming in Arabic and English that they were police. The Americans kept firing volley after volley from big and small guns, they said from their hospital beds. The fusillade raged for a half hour, they said, as more men died and more men groaned in pain from their wounds.

Relations between Fallujah’s residents and US forces in the area have been on a knife’s edge since shortly after the city was captured in April. Friday’s killings are certain to inflame the smoldering hatred of the American occupation.

For the rest of Iraq, the incident was likely to stoke resentment of US troops — already seen by some as trigger-happy and heavy-handed.

Yesterday, some in Fallujah talked of revenge, while others suggested that paying blood money to the families of the victims, as US forces had done in the past to mend relations with the city’s conservative and deeply tribal residents, may not defuse the situation.

In Geneva, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that progress had been made toward a new UN Security Council resolution on Iraq — although he made it plain there still remained big differences with France on how and when to give Iraqis responsibility to run their country.

He later left Geneva and headed for Iraq — becoming the highest-ranking American official to visit the country since the war.