BAGHDAD, 19 March 2004 — Fresh violence claimed the lives of nine people, four of them journalists, in Iraq yesterday.
US troops shot dead an Iraqi working for Dubai-based Arab satellite television channel Al-Arabiya and critically wounded another in central Baghdad, colleagues said.
Al-Arabiya employees said the Iraqis were driving in central Baghdad when another car drove through a US checkpoint. They said US troops then opened fire on both cars.
Doctors initially said both Al-Arabiya employees had been killed but later said one of them was critically wounded with a gunshot wound to the head.
A US military spokeswoman said she had no immediate information on the incident.
“I stopped in front of the checkpoint and then I saw another car coming fast toward it and I thought it was going to explode,” said Ahmed Abdul Amiya, the driver of the Al-Arabiya car. “I tried to race away... and then the Americans started firing at random. They hit the first car and then they started shooting at our car.”
In Baquba, gunmen opened fire on a minibus, killing three Iraqi journalists and wounding nine other employees of a coalition-funded TV station, police said.
Earlier in the day, a suicide bomber blew up a car near a hotel in the southern city of Basra as a British military patrol passed by, killing three bystanders — the latest in a series of attacks just before the anniversary of the start of the war.
A man suspected of being involved in the bombing and who got out of the vehicle shortly before the blast, was caught by passers-by and stabbed to death, Lt. Col. Ali Kazem of the Iraqi police said. Two others also spotted getting out of the vehicle before the explosion were caught by members of the public and later arrested.
At least 15 people were wounded, three of them seriously, hospital officials said. Ambulances rushed to the area, and Iraqi police and British forces tried to push the crowd back.
The three civilians killed were two men and a boy, police said. The body of the suspected suicide bomber was still in the vehicle. No British soldiers were wounded in the attack.
Insurgents also fired mortar rounds at two US military bases on Wednesday, killing three American soldiers and wounding nine others, the military said Thursday. The deaths brought to 567 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq since the start of hostilities last year, according to Defense Department figures.
In Baghdad, the US military lowered the death toll in Wednesday’s suicide bombing of a hotel to seven, after initially putting it at 27. US Army Col. Jill Morgenthaler put the toll at 17, and Brig Gen. Mark Kimmitt later lowered it to seven.
Iraq doesn’t have a centralized system for handling such tragedies and with the bodies of victims going to different morgues, death tolls are often in dispute.
Kimmitt said 35 people were wounded in Wednesday’s car bombing at the Mount Lebanon Hotel in the heart of Baghdad. Scott Mounce, 29, from Inverness in Scotland was killed and another Briton was wounded, the British government said.
