Attacks in Iraq leave 11 dead and cut oil sales

IRAQ: Iraq was hit by a wave of sabotage and violence over the weekend as a second blaze hit a crucial oil export pipeline, a water pipeline was blown up and six Iraqis were killed in a mortar attack on a Baghdad prison.A Danish soldier was killed as he tried to stop looting on Saturday night. Three Iraqis also died in weekend incidents.

Last night a Reuters cameraman was shot dead while filming near a prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. Eyewitnesses said he was shot by soldiers on a US tank as he filmed outside Abu Ghraib prison. Six Iraqi inmates were killed and 59 injured when three mortars were fired early yesterday into the same prison complex, 36 kms west of Baghdad.

The vast walled compound, located close to the main highway, serves as the largest incarceration facility for Iraq's criminals as well as a base for US military police and other troops, believed to be the target of the attackers.

A few hours after the mortar strike on the prison, a major water pipeline in north Baghdad was fractured by a bomb, sending water cascading into the streets and cutting off supply to parts of the capital.

Officials said that it would take at least eight hours to repair the damage. While this was the first attack on a water main, saboteurs have struck power cables and high tension towers, water and sewage pumping facilities, fuel depots and oil installations with the aim of undermining the US occupation regime.

Last Friday the oil export pipeline to Turkey was shut down by an explosion which set the crude alight as it was being pumped to the Turkish port of Cayhan for shipment.

The attack took place just two days after the 1,000 km-long pipeline reopened. As firemen struggled to put out the blaze, Mr Thamer Ghadaban, Iraq's acting oil minister, said: "It could take several days to repair it and put it back in operation."

At the time of the explosion, there were technical problems from the pressure of pumping the oil through the 96 cm pipeline which has not been properly maintained for at least a decade due to economic sanctions.

Exports of oil from the south have been limited due to electricity cuts and the pillage of equipment from the port of Umm Qasr. Mr Paul Bremer, the US administrator of Iraq, said that the shut-down was depriving the country of $7 million a day in revenue and preventing Iraq from rebuilding its infrastructure.

Also on Saturday, a Danish soldier and two Iraqis were killed north of Basra in a shoot-out with a lorry carrying Iraqis suspected of stealing power cables in order to extract and sell the copper wire. The Dane was the first fatality since his country's contingent of 420 arrived in the British occupation zone.

At Baqouba a US soldier was injured in a grenade attack on a patrol and in Baghdad two US soldiers were shot and wounded as they left a restaurant.

In the northern city of Mosul, the Iraqi chief of police was injured when his convoy was fired upon by militants and an Iraqi security guard was killed and four of his comrades were wounded when the headquarters of the facility protection force was struck by a rocket propelled grenade. This group was set up to guard hospitals, schools and other public installations which have been subjected to looting since the fall of the former regime in April.

Mr Bremer blames supporters of Saddam Hussein and foreign Islamists for sabotage and assaults on US forces which have killed 60 US troops, eight British soldiers and the Dane since May 1st, when the major combat phase of the war was officially declared at an end.

Mr Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner charged with re-establishing Iraq's interior ministry, announced that Brig Gen Ahmed Ibrahim, an officer imprisoned for criticising Saddam, would be the number two at the ministry.

Brig Ibrahim, formerly in the special investigation unit of the police, was shot in the leg last month during an exchange of fire with criminals.

Meanwhile US troops have temporarily pulled out of the Shia slum quarter of Baghdad known as "Sadr city" following demonstrations on Friday when a US military helicopter downed a religious banner flying from a communications tower. Tension flared after a cleric denounced US forces and called for their withdrawal from the quarter housing some two million people.

US and Iraqi officials have expressed serious concern that a Shaikh Ahmad Kubeisi, a popular Sunni Muslim cleric, and Sayyed Muqtada Sadr, the rabble-rousing son of a revered Shia ayatollah for whom "Sadr City" was named, have joined forces. The two clerics have emerged as leading critics of the US occupation and opponents of the Governing Council established in July by the US.