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US soldier killed by shrapnel
03/01/2004 20:51 - (SA)
Tikrit, Iraq - Another American soldier was confirmed dead Saturday in the unrelenting violence targeting the US military in Iraq as efforts continued to contain potentially explosive tensions in the northern city of Kirkuk.
The latest US casualty came on Friday in an attack at Balad, 75km north of Baghdad, shortly after insurgents in the volatile western town of Fallujah shot down a US helicopter, killing one soldier and wounding another.
The deaths bring to 213 the number of US combat fatalities in Iraq since US President George W Bush declared an end to major hostilities on May 1 and comes amid fears of a switch in tactics by insurgents to target civilians.
Sergeant Robert Cargie, speaking for the 4th Infantry Division, said the soldier was struck by shrapnel from a mortar exploding inside a military base.
Also on Friday, a fuel convoy was attacked west of Ramadi, 100km west of the capital, with an improvised explosive device, small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), wounding three people.
A US army patrol was attacked on the southern outskirts of Baghdad with an IED and small arms fire at noon on the same day. The soldiers' Humvee vehicle burst into flames and flipped over, causing an unknown number of casualties.
Press arrests
Meanwhile, Reuters news agency said on Saturday that three of its employees arrested at the scene of the helicopter crash were still in US custody and no reason had been given for their detention.
US Brigadier General Mark Kimmit said the helicopter was fired on after the attack by people wearing jackets labelled "press" and four were later arrested. It was not clear if these included the Reuters staff.
In the northern Iraqi oil centre of Kirkuk, where ethnic rivalries erupted into violence earlier this week and left seven people dead, three people were injured in separate shooting incidents.
Two Iraqi Arabs who attempted to attack police were lightly injured when officers opened fire, police said. A Turkmen security guard was also injured when unknown assailants opened fire on a Turkmen political party headquarters.
Police indicate the violence was linked to the recent rise in ethnic tensions that have challenged a fragile truce between Kirkuk's Kurdish majority and Arabs and Turkmen.
The US army imposed a night curfew in the city on Friday.
Elsewhere in Iraq, insurgents derailed a train, hitting it with an RPG before stealing the locomotive's batteries.
Iraqi police said six suspects, including a Yemeni and an Afghan, had been arrested by US troops and weapons seized near the restive town of Baqubah, north of Baghdad.
And 82nd Airborne troops said they captured six guerrillas who recently attacked a police station in al-Haswah. Along with Habbaniyah, the town falls inside restive Al-Anbar province, home to the country's Sunni Muslim minority, which ruled Iraq until the fall of Saddam Hussein last April.
On Friday, Brigadier General Kimmit warned of an alarming new trend in attacks following a New Year's Eve car bombing on a Baghdad restaurant that left eight dead.
"Certainly this is the first large-scale attack that we've seen on a purely civilian target of this kind," he said of the restaurant blast, which was the latest in a series of attacks in Baghdad's upmarket Karrada district.
- AFP
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