BAGHDAD, 11 October 2007 — Outraged Iraqi authorities yesterday condemned the killing in Baghdad of two women by foreign security guards but the Australian-run firm that hired the contractors defended their actions. “The government and the prime minister and everybody categorically condemns the actions of this company,” the head of Baghdad security, Gen. Qassim Mussawi, said in a statement.

Tuesday’s shooting came just days after Iraq vowed to punish US firm Blackwater when a probe found that its guards opened “deliberate” fire in another incident in Baghdad three weeks ago, killing 17 civilians. Witnesses to the latest shooting, in Karrada neighborhood, said a woman taxi driver mistakenly got too close to a convoy of Dubai-based Unity Resources Group (URG) and came under immediate gunfire by the guards.

Family members held a funeral service for the two women after the shooting on Tuesday at a Baghdad intersection involving guards working for Australian-run URG. “It opened fire randomly, hitting an Oldsmobile vehicle being driven by a woman,” Mussawi told Reuters, adding that the shooting was under investigation.

The taxi driver, an Armenian Christian identified as Maroni Ohannes, 49, and a female passenger died of gunshots to the head. Another woman passenger was wounded in the shoulder, while a child was injured by flying glass. Several witnesses reported barrages of gunfire, and a policeman who witnessed the shooting said that after blazing away at the car the foreign security guards sped off “like gangsters.”

Commenting on the incident, Unity said “the first information that we have is that our security team was approached at speed by a vehicle which failed to stop despite an escalation of warnings which included hand signals and a signal flare.

Meanwhile, eleven children and two female teachers were wounded when an Iraqi primary school was hit by mortar fire in the city of Diwaniyah yesterday, police said. Three mortar shells landed in a hall while children were attending classes at the school in Diwaniyah, which lies about 180 kilometers south of Baghdad. Two bystanders were also wounded. Security sources took control of Al-Ruwad school after the attack and transported the children to the hospital, police said.

In another attack yesterday, a car bomb exploded in the central city of Tikrit, the hometown of executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Four people were killed and eight wounded. Two police were among those killed after explosives in the car were detonated as a police patrol was passing, said a police official in Tikrit.

The car had been parked near a branch of Iraq’s main Rafidain bank in the center of the city, 180 miles north of Baghdad, he added.