Market Attack Finger-Pointing Continues

A U.S. military spokesman said Thursday "it was entirely possible" that an Iraqi missile was responsible for the marketplace explosion in Baghdad that killed 14 civilians.

Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said during a Central Command briefing Thursday there was an Iraqi missile battery near the neighborhood and that Iraqi has been using old missile stock fired with guidance systems turned off.

"We think it is entirely possible that this may have been an Iraqi missile that went up and came down," Brooks said.

He said the United States had an air mission in the area but not in the neighborhood that was devastated by the explosion.

"We did have an air mission that attacked some targets, not in that area but in an another area, and they did encounter some surface-to-air missile fire," Brooks said.

Asked about when the military might conclude its internal investigation, Brooks said he did not know.

"I think we won't have a final answer until we're in Baghdad ourselves, which we will be," Brooks said. "The best we can do at this point is account for everything we did and we have accounted for our weapon systems that we fired on that night."

"They hit their target, we're certain of that. The rest of the story, we just don't know. We may never know."

Fourteen civilians were reported killed in the north Baghdad al-Shaab neighborhood in a blast that Iraqi officials blamed on cruise missiles.

Iraq's health minister said a total of 36 civilians were killed and 215 wounded in U.S. air strikes on Baghdad Wednesday. He accused the United States and Britain of deliberately targeting civilians to break the Iraqi people's will.

"They are targeting the human beings in Iraq to decrease their morale," Omeed Medhat Mubarak said. "They are not discriminating, differentiating."

Mubarak cited the attack as being a typical example of improper military actions.

"So you see, the American and British mercenaries are targeting civilians regardless of their age," he said. "They targeted shops and small public-sector installations."

He accused U.S. and British forces of dropping cluster bombs on civilian targets.

"In Najaf, they destroyed a medical center," he said. "They bombed an ambulance and killed its driver."

Despite the "random bombing," Mubarak said, "medical supplies are in good shape. Our morale is very good." he said hospitals are operating normally.

Brooks said civilian injuries appeared to be concentrated in Shiite populations and "there may be a pattern" of Iraqis targeting that group, which is the majority in the country ruled by Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime.

Photographs shown at the briefing included a damaged missile factory in Baghdad and a television satellite transmission facility that was knocked off the air.

Brooks agreed with British assessments that battlefield activities by Iraqi forces in the past day or so showed that Saddam Hussein was losing control over his forces.

Brooks concurred with the British charge earlier Thursday that Saddam's paramilitary forces were threatening regular troops with execution or threatening to kill their families if they did not fight.