World

GIs Kill Gunmen, Close Iraq Paper

March 30, 2004 / 9:30 AM EST / CBS/AP

U.S. soldiers in the northern city of Mosul shot and killed four rebels a day after padlocking a newspaper for allegedly printing articles that incited violence against American troops.

The four slain gunmen were suspected of involvement in attacks in the region, the military said Monday. Two American soldiers were wounded in the firefight, which came hours after gunmen fired on a convoy carrying a government minister near Mosul. A Canadian and Briton were killed in the area.

On Sunday, the U.S.-led coalition shut down a weekly newspaper run by followers of a hardline Shiite Muslim cleric, saying its articles were increasing the threat of violence against occupation forces.

Hours after the closure of Al-Hawza, more than 1,000 supporters of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr demonstrated peacefully in front of the newspaper's offices, decrying what they called a crackdown on freedom of expression.

In other developments:

British troops in Basra clashed with dozens of Iraqis when the soldiers tried to evict anti-coalition activists from a government-owned building. Three Iraqis were injured. Also, a freelance photographer was wounded when he was shot in a leg with a rubber bullet by the soldiers.

Israel encouraged the belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because of faulty intelligence based on hearsay and speculation, said a parliamentary inquiry. The report stressed that the intelligence agencies did not deliberately mislead Israeli officials or try to push the United States into war against Iraq.

To date 585 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq a year ago. Allied government have lost 96 troops. Nearly 3,000 Americans have been wounded.

The U.N. Security Council is not considering sending a U.N. peacekeeping force to Iraq, and is instead working for a multinational force under single command, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told an Italian newspaper.

Members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council met an electoral team from the United Nations on Monday to discuss setting up an interim government and plans for general elections due by Jan. 31. The U.S.-led coalition plans to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged in a 60 Minutes interview that President Bush wanted to know if there was a link between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks. "This was a country with which we'd been to war a couple of times, that were firing at our airplanes in the no-fly zone. It made perfectly good sense to ask about Iraq," she said. A former official says Mr. Bush pressured aides to find a link, but Rice denies it.

In Mosul, the four rebels were killed late Sunday in a firefight with a U.S. military police patrol, the military said in a statement. The troops had stopped the rebels' vehicle because it matched the description of one used in an earlier drive-by shooting at U.S. forces in the city.

Inside the vehicle, soldiers found assault rifles, a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher and other weapons. The statement said U.S. and Iraqi security forces were investigating to see whether the rebels "were involved in any of the recent attacks against Iraqi government officials, Iraqi security forces or coalition soldiers."

Two soldiers were wounded in the fighting, the statement said.

The attack earlier Sunday on the convoy of Iraq's minister of public works, Nisreen Berwari, left the driver and a bodyguard dead and two others injured. The assault occurred when Berwari, who was unhurt, was returning to Mosul from a meeting in the city of Dohuk, said Kristi Clemens, said a coalition spokeswoman in Baghdad.

Saro Qader, an official with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, described the attack as an "assassination attempt." Berwari is a member of the Kurdish party and one of five Kurdish ministers in the U.S.-led coalition-appointed interim government.

U.S. military officials in Mosul say insurgents are shifting from attacks on American troops to targeting Iraqi security forces, and most recently civilians.

The slain Briton and Canadian were shot to death in Mosul, also Sunday. The pair had been assigned to protect foreign engineers working for General Electric Co., a coalition spokesman said on condition of anonymity. GE is helping rebuild Iraq's decrepit electrical infrastructure, which has suffered from war, neglect and years of sanctions. Power blackouts are frequent.

The killings appeared to be part of a campaign to undermine U.S.-led reconstruction efforts in Iraq. The attacks highlighted the tenuous security situation in Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, once a prime recruiting ground for the officer corps of Saddam Hussein's army.

This month, assailants have killed other Western civilians linked to reconstruction efforts: four American missionaries working on a water project in Mosul, two Finnish businessmen in Baghdad, a German and a Dutch national working on a water project south of Baghdad, and two American staffers with the coalition shot south of the capital.