IRAQ: A US soldier was killed and two were wounded in a bomb attack yesterday west of Baghdad, as Kurds near the Iranian border said they had captured dozens of militant fighters trying to infiltrate Iraq.
A US Army spokeswoman said the soldier died when three synchronised bombs were detonated near a convoy in the town of Ramadi. The attack brought to 57 the number of US soldiers killed in guerrilla attacks since the start of May.
In the northern city of Mosul a US humvee vehicle was destroyed in a blast, and witnesses said four casualties were taken away.
Mr Adel Murad, a spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), said Kurdish Peshmerga militiamen had rounded up 50 people near the Iranian border, some of them members of the Ansar al-Islam group, which Washington has linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. Mr Paul Bremer, Iraq's US governor, told a news conference that Ansar al-Islam was one of the groups under suspicion for a truck-bomb attack on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad last week that killed at least 17 people and wounded scores.
He said the attack was "an act of irresponsible terrorism by criminals", but it was too early to say who was to blame.
"It's possible this attack was conducted by foreign terrorists. It is also possible it was conducted by Iraqis," he said. "The investigation by Iraqi police is going forward.
"Ansar al-Islam, of course, has long-standing connections, affiliations if you wish, with al-Qaeda," Mr Bremer said. Its fighters had fled to Iran during the war but "a couple of hundred" had now returned to Iraq.
Mr Murad of the PUK said Ansar al-Islam was regrouping.
"Now we think the group has returned to the area to resume their terrorist acts in Kurdistan and to participate in terrorist operations inside Iraq," he said.
US military investigators have concluded that American forces acted "in an appropriate manner" when they fired into a Baghdad hotel in April, accidentally killing a Reuters TV cameraman and another journalist, a defence official said yesterday.
The official said an investigation by the US military's Central Command had cleared troops of wrongdoing in firing a tank shell into an upper floor of the Palestine Hotel during fighting in the area on April 8.
The results of investigation found that US forces had captured an Iraqi military radio and heard transmissions indicating troops were being watched and that intense fire was being directed at them by a spotter in a building, the official said.