BAGHDAD, 30 March 2004 — US soldiers in the northern city of Mosul shot and killed four rebels suspected of involvement in attacks in the region, the military said yesterday. Two American soldiers were wounded in the firefight.

The fighting came hours after gunmen fired on a convoy carrying a government minister near Mosul and the separate killings of a Canadian and Briton in the area.

In the southern city of Basra, British troops clashed with dozens of Iraqis when the soldiers tried to evict anti-coalition activists from a government-owned building. Associated Press Television News footage showed Iraqis throwing stones at the troops and their vehicles. At one stage, two soldiers struggled with an Iraqi man as he tried to grab one of their weapons. Three Iraqis were injured.

Also, a freelance photographer working for The Associated Press, Nabil Al-Jourani, was wounded when he was shot in a leg with a rubber bullet by the soldiers. Attempts to contact British forces in the region were not immediately successful.

Five militiamen from the Islamist Thaar Allah (God’s Revenge) group were wounded in the fighting that broke out when British soldiers tried to evict them from a building they were squatting in, a spokesman for the Islamists said.

The Basra governor ordered the group to leave the premises, which belong to a local women’s association, 10 days ago. “Five of our comrades were wounded in fighting that broke out when British soldiers wielding clubs came to evict us. There were several injuries on the British side,” he told AFP, declining to give his name.

British forces also fired warning shots in Amara north of Basra to disperse protesting job seekers who were stoning soldiers guarding the governor’s building, police said, adding that there were no casualties.

North of the capital in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, two Iraqi women were killed and a police officer and a child wounded when a civilian car collided with a US armored vehicle.

In eastern Baghdad, US troops were called in by Iraqi police to defuse a roadside bomb found in an underpass, after another charge exploded rattling the city just after noon (0900 GMT), police said. On Sunday, the US-led coalition shut down a weekly newspaper run by followers of a hard-line Shiite cleric, saying its articles were increasing the threat of violence against occupation forces.

Hours after the closure of Al-Hawza, more than 1,000 supporters of cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr demonstrated peacefully in front of the newspaper’s offices, decrying what they called a crackdown on freedom of expression.

In Mosul, the four rebels were killed late Sunday in a firefight with a US military police patrol, the military said in a statement. The troops had stopped the rebels’ vehicle because it matched the description of one used in an earlier drive-by shooting at US forces in the city.

Inside the vehicle, soldiers found assault rifles, a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher and other weapons. The statement said US and Iraqi security forces were investigating to see whether the rebels “were involved in any of the recent attacks against Iraqi government officials, Iraqi security forces or coalition soldiers.”

The attack earlier Sunday on the convoy of Iraq’s minister of public works, Nisreen Berwari, left the driver and a bodyguard dead and two others injured. The assault occurred when Berwari, who was unhurt, was returning to Mosul from a meeting in the city of Dohuk, said Kristi Clemens, said a coalition spokeswoman in Baghdad.

On the political front, UN envoys met members of the US-installed interim Governing Council for fresh talks on the handover of power amid criticism of coalition plans to hand sovereignty to an unelected caretaker government operating under an interim constitution by June 30. “About seven or eight members of the Governing Council are participating in the meeting,” a spokesman for the council said.

The UN team is made up technical experts who are due to advise on the modalities of demands from the Shiite majority for rapid elections, including preparations for a population census and electoral register.