U.S. Marines shot dead an unarmed Iraqi driver at a military checkpoint in southern Iraq on Tuesday, just hours after 10 women and children died in a similar incident.
"I thought it was a suicide bomb," said one of the servicemen who fired on the vehicle near Shatra, 36 kilometers from Nassiriya.
A couple of hours after daybreak, the Iraqi driver had driven his white pickup truck toward the roadblock on a main highway. As he drove straight through the coils of wire, the Marines sprayed his vehicle with bullets, killing him and hitting his one middle-aged passenger in the arms and legs.
The truck was carrying no load and neither of the men in it was in uniform or armed.
The U.S. military also said on Tuesday U.S. soldiers killed an Iraqi fighter and wounded three others when their pickup truck tried to crash through a military checkpoint near Samawa, on the Euphrates river between Nassiriya and Najaf.
Meanwhile, US warplanes and missiles blasted targets in Baghdad overnight, including one of Saddam Hussein's palaces and Iraq's Olympic headquarters.
Six explosions in rapid succession shook central Baghdad on Monday night.
U.S. military officials said aircraft bombed a complex that serves as the office of the Iraqi National Olympic Committee.
The lower four floors of the nine-story Olympic building were severely damaged. Walls were blown out, and mangled wire and steel protruded. The building sits in a big complex of housing units.
Early Tuesday, American forces launched missiles toward Baghdad and the city of Karbala to the southwest. A huge explosion rocked the Old Palace compound shortly after 9 a.m. (Albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
