Up to five Iraqis were injured, one of them critically, when a car bomb exploded outside a hotel close to Australia's diplomatic mission in Baghdad, the US military said.
The mission lies opposite the hotel in the central Jadriyah district and Iraqi police said they believed it was the target although Australian diplomats disagreed.
"It was a car bomb. We don't know yet if it is a suicide car bomb," Colonel Mike Murray of the 1st Cavalry Division said at the scene.
"Up to five Iraqis were wounded. One of them - a boy aged 11 or 12 - is in a critical condition," he said.
"As far as I know there are no Westerners in the hotel."
Earlier, Interior ministry spokesman Colonel Adnan Abdel Rahman said that three people, two of them hotel guests and the other a little girl passing nearby were wounded when a car parked outside the Kurma hotel exploded.
At the nearby Australian mission compound, which is barricaded by concrete, barbed wire and sandbags, security officer Rihab Abbas said she saw huge flames leap into the air after she heard the blast at 8:15 am (local time).
"I can tell you there was an explosion. It was very loud, but it would be inaccurate to say there was a bomb outside the Australian embassy or where the Australians live," said mission head Neil Muels.
Meanwhile, early Tuesday, the military said that one U.S. soldier was killed and four others were wounded in a rocket attack on an occupation base northwest of Baghdad. The military statement did not name the base or the soldier slain in the Monday afternoon attack.
Elsewhere, at least nine Iraqis were killed and 19 were injured, mostly civilians, in fighting between U.S.
forces and fighters loyal to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf and neighboring Kufa, hospital officials said Tuesday.
Fighting raged after daybreak in Najaf, where explosions
and gunfire were heard around the city's Revolution of 1920
Square and the cemetery, a warren of paths and tombs that
offers numerous hiding places for fighters armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
Seven people were killed and five injured in Najaf on
Tuesday, said Seyed Kifah Shemal, an official at Hakim
General Hospital.
Two people died and 14 were injured in overnight fighting
in Kufa, said Riyadh Kadhem, a nurse at the Forat al-Awsat
hospital in Kufa. (Albawaba.com)
© 2004 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
