Iraq: A grenade attack killed a US soldier in Iraq yesterday and an oil pipeline fire blazed out of control following an overnight explosion said by an Iraqi official to have been the result of sabotage.
The US military said that a second soldier was wounded in the attack on a military convoy at Khan Azad, about 20km south of Baghdad.
The first soldier was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.
The incident was the latest in a series of deadly assaults on US forces since President George Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1st.
Two US soldiers were wounded in the town of Hit, about 140km north-west of Baghdad, on Saturday afternoon when their vehicle ran over a landmine.
About an hour before midnight, a US patrol reported a fire at an Iraqi fuel pipeline in the desert near Hit.
"This incident is an act of sabotage. The pipeline was blown up deliberately," said an Iraqi Oil Ministry official.
A Reuters correspondent at the scene said that orange fireballs and thick black smoke were billowing from the damaged pipeline more than 12 hours after the blast. No US troops or Iraqi officials were at the scene and no attempt was being made to extinguish the blaze.
A US military spokesman said earlier that efforts were under way to put out the fire. He had no word on its cause.
This was the second major fire to damage Iraqi pipelines this month. US officials blamed the first on gas leaking from the main export pipeline from the Kirkuk oilfields to Turkey.
The oil pipeline at Hit, with a gas pipeline alongside it, was built in the 1980s to connect Iraq's southern and northern oilfields, enabling exports to flow smoothly.
The Iraqi Oil Ministry official said that any break in the oil pipeline could disrupt output at Baghdad's main refinery.
The refinery at al-Doura serves a city whose five million people have barely had time to forget the misery of petrol queues which snaked through sweltering streets for weeks after US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein on April 9th.
Iraq, which exported around two million barrels of oil per day before the US-led war, relaunched oil sales yesterday from eight million barrels stored in Turkey.
A Turkish tanker loaded a million barrels of oil bound for Turkish refineries from the Mediterranean terminal of Ceyhan