FALLUJAH, Iraq, 2 July 2004 — US forces attacked what they said was a safe house belonging to Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi yesterday, killing at least six people.
In the fourth strike targeting suspected Zarqawi hideouts in Fallujah in the past two weeks, a US plane fired a missile overnight that witnesses said reduced the building to rubble. Hospital sources said six people were killed and 15 wounded in the strike, some of them women and children.
Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for the decapitation of an American and a South Korean hostage and threatened to assassinate Iraq’s interim prime minister.
Three people also died when a senior finance ministry official was targeted in a roadside bombing in Baghdad. Ihsan Karim, a financial controller at the ministry, was seriously wounded while his driver and one bodyguard were killed on the spot in the blast as they drove down a main road in the capital’s western district of Yarmuk. Karim later died from his wounds in hospital.
And two more Iraqis were killed and a woman lost a leg in another roadside blast, this time aimed at a US military convoy in the center of the capital.
Meanwhile, one US soldier was killed and two were wounded when their convoy was attacked outside the northern city of Mosul.
