U.S. troops kill 2 Iraqis

BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops killed a City Council member and a police captain in the north-central city of Duluiyah after the soldiers came under small-arms fire from the two men, the U.S. military said yesterday.

The attack occurred late Friday, when soldiers were traveling through the city to follow up on a tip that occupants of a house were involved in an earlier attack on a U.S. convoy.

Three men — including the City Council member, Jabbar Ateiya Saud, and the police captain — ambushed the troops as they were en route to the home, a U.S. military spokesman said.

The other man was detained. No U.S. troops were injured in the incident, and yesterday the city was temporarily placed under curfew from 7:30 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Maj. Anton Alston, a U.S. spokesman in Tikrit, said that Duluiyah has been volatile for several days and that the curfew was agreed upon by local leaders and Iraqi and U.S. forces in an attempt to restore order.

On Tuesday, four private contractors were killed and two others injured in an ambush on their convoy as they passed through the city, Alston said.

"It's been pretty violent for the last several days," said Alston, who did not know the nationality of the contractors.

In a separate incident in Baghdad, three Iraqi soldiers and two civilians were killed and seven people were wounded yesterday when a suicide bomber blew up his explosives-rigged vehicle near a popular bazaar in Wathiq Square, officials said.

Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility. In the southern city of Karbala, U.S. troops killed a family of four yesterday when the family apparently drove too close to an American convoy.

And in Basra, anti-British tensions continued to boil over last week's incident involving two British soldiers detained by Iraqi police while apparently on an undercover mission. Yesterday, a judge issued arrest warrants for the two men on homicide charges.

The two soldiers were part of a Special Air Service (SAS) team monitoring militant infiltration from Iran, the Sunday Times of London said.

The soldiers were freed in a controversial rescue mission by British forces, who used armored vehicles to breach a wall of a prison.

By some accounts the soldiers, who were dressed in Arab garb at the time of their arrests, were detained after fatally shooting one police officer and wounding another.

British forces surrounded the police station, but negotiations for the men's release stalled and a mob with gasoline bombs attacked and set fire to British armored vehicles.

It later emerged that the two had been handed over to local militia members. As armored vehicles bulldozed their way into the police station, soldiers freed the two men from a nearby house.

The British reiterated that the Iraqis have no authority to try the men according to Iraqi transitional law, which stipulates that coalition forces are immune from prosecution by Iraqi authorities.

Compiled from the Chicago Tribune and Reuters