BAGHDAD, 26 January 2004 — Another US soldier was killed in Iraq, the eighth American troop fatality in a 24-hour wave of violence, as thousands rallied in Tokyo yesterday against sending Japanese troops to the war-battered country.

The American soldier died of wounds sustained in a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attack on his Bradley fighting vehicle on Wednesday night in Beiji, north of Baghdad, military spokesman Maj. Josslyn Aberle said.

Six of the attackers were captured and the RPG launcher recovered, she added.

The latest death took to 240 the number of US soldiers killed in combat in Iraq since US President George W. Bush declared an end to major hostilities on May 1.

A US army helicopter crashed into the Tigris river in Mosul yesterday on a mission to rescue a US soldier lost in the river in a boat accident that killed two Iraqi police and a civilian, the military said.

“An OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter attached to the 101st Airborne Division crashed at approximately 6:40 pm (1540 GMT) in the Tigris river near downtown Mosul. A search for the two pilots is under way,” a US spokesman said.

On Saturday, a car laden with explosives plowed into a checkpoint west of Baghdad and exploded killing three US troops and wounding six. Another two soldiers died just hours earlier in an improvised bomb attack in the same area.

And two US pilots died on Friday when their helicopter came down near the northern city of Kayyarah, but it was not immediately clear whether hostile fire was the cause.

Four Iraqi civilians were also killed when a device exploded in the northern town of Samarra and three policemen were killed in Mosul, Baghdad and Kirkuk.

Despite the unrelenting insurgency, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the coalition ground forces commander in Iraq, denied US troops were bogged down in Iraq.

Asked whether he thought US troops were becoming stuck in a quagmire as Iraq lurches toward a transitional national government in June, Sanchez told AFP: “Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

“I think what we’re seeing overall across the country is a reasonable decrease in the number of engagements,” he said.

Meanwhile in Tokyo, some 6,000 people staged a rally against sending Japanese troops to Iraq, a day before Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s planned order for the dispatch of the main contingent of a 600-strong force.

“Stop sending the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq. We don’t need a war,” read banners carried by demonstrators at Hibiya park near Tokyo’s Imperial Palace.

Under the order to be issued by Koizumi, the main contingent will be formed Feb. 1 and sent in batches from early February through to March to provide relief aid such as water purification.

Last Monday, a 39-strong advance team of Japanese troops arrived in Samawa, marking the country’s first military deployment in a hostile region since World War II.

Back in Iraq, other violence saw an improvised bomb explode close to the capital’s Masbah hotel, apparently targeting a passing US military convoy, a US soldier on the scene said. There were no reports of casualties.

The surge in violence came as a two-man UN security team began a mission to Iraq, ending a general withdrawal of UN personnel three months ago ordered by Secretary General Kofi Annan after a bomb attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad last August that killed 22 people.