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=> Assyrian bodycount 4 dead 2 injured.....

Assyrian bodycount 4 dead 2 injured.....
Posted by Tiglath (Guest) davidchibo@hotmail.com - Friday, March 19 2004, 1:22:29 (EST)
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10 Iraqis Are Killed In Spasm of Attacks
U.S. Troops Kill Television Journalist
By Karl Vick and Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A15


BAQUBAH, Iraq, March 18 -- Ten Iraqis died in separate attacks around Iraq on Thursday and U.S. troops shot and killed an Iraqi television journalist two days before the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion that ousted the government of president Saddam Hussein.



The violence came a day after a massive car bomb exploded outside the Mount Lebanon Hotel in downtown Baghdad. U.S. officials revised the number of victims in the hotel bombing to seven killed and 35 wounded from an earlier report of 27 dead and 45 wounded. They said they based the change on information from Iraqi police and health officials. But interviews with relatives of victims indicated the toll could be higher.

In this unsettled city 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, witnesses reported that a powerfully built man hoisted a heavy machine gun out of the trunk of a parked car Thursday morning and strafed a busload of employees commuting to work at a regional television and radio station established by the U.S.-controlled occupation authority. Three Iraqi employees died and 10 were wounded.

In the southern city of Basra, a car bomb exploded outside a hotel used for briefings by British forces. Three Iraqi passersby died. The bomber was also killed, and an angry crowd stabbed and killed a man said to have gotten out of the car before it exploded, news services reported.

And in Fallujah, a seat of Sunni resistance west of the capital, a firefight between insurgents and U.S. troops meeting Iraqi administrators left two Iraqis dead, one a young boy. Eight soldiers were wounded by a mortar attack that apparently triggered the exchange.

After dark, a series of small explosions echoed across downtown Baghdad. Mortars fell in the compound known as the Green Zone that houses the headquarters of U.S.-led occupation. A witness also reported seeing rockets launched from near the German Embassy downtown.

Also in Baghdad, an employee of al-Arabiya, the Arabic-language satellite news channel, was killed by U.S. troops at a checkpoint, the channel reported. A second employee of the channel, based in the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, was reported critically wounded in the same incident.

"I stopped in front of the checkpoint and then I saw another car coming fast toward it and I thought it was going to explode," Ahmed Abdul Amiya, the driver of the al-Arabiya car, told the Reuters news agency. "I tried to race away. . . . and then the Americans started firing at random. They hit the first car and then they started shooting at our car."

The nationalities of those killed on Wednesday night at the Mount Lebanon Hotel remained unclear. One British citizen was seriously injured and another may have been killed in the bombing, according to the British Foreign Office. Hotel employees said the guests included citizens of Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and Lebanon. The hotel's Lebanese owner, Jihad Azzam, was seriously injured, hotel managers said.

"We are simply unsure of either the motivation or the target of the attack," said Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a military spokesman. The bomb, estimated by military officials as 1,000 pounds of plastic explosives, was huge by local standards. But the officials said that the blast was in the middle of the street rather than close to the hotel, suggesting the bomb may have detonated prematurely.

Some of those who survived Thursday's attacks blamed U.S. authorities for not protecting them.

"They are not giving us security," said Mustapha Ibrahim Mustapha, 41, his face cut from flying glass in the machine-gunning of the TV employee bus in Baqubah. Survivors of the attack said U.S. forces guard the station, established by the occupation authorities to provide local radio and television service in the area. Officials said several bombs near the facility had been defused.

But station employees remained vulnerable en route to work. Witnesses reported that the attackers waited beside a dark blue Opel sedan on the highway where the employee minibus travels every day.

"They didn't even cover their faces," said Hussein Mohammad, 26. The wounded television reporter, who has covered the scores of attacks on U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians around Baqubah, held his blood-stained palms six inches apart to show the size of the magazine on the machine gun that killed two colleagues, Nadia Nasrat Hikmat, a program host, and Majid Rashi al Masaudi, a technician. An Iraqi Civil Defense Corps officer on the bus, Mohammad Mujamae, also was killed.

"Everyone who lives in Iraq is targeted," said Hussein Mohammad , his face contorted in grief.

Random interviews conducted with people affected by the Mount Lebanon Hotel attack suggested the suddenly reduced casualty count could rise again.

Firas Hamadani, 48, a computer parts salesman dressed in a sharp business suit, sobbed quietly as he stood near the wreckage outside the hotel. Four of his friends were driving in a white Opal toward his house when they were caught in the explosion. He said two of them, ages 27 and 28, died.

At Ibn Nafis hospital, Ata Puturs, 17, was the only survivor from a house across the street from the hotel. Her grandfather, his wife and two sons were killed, according to friends of their close-knit Chaldean-Assyrian family, part of Baghdad's Christian community.

Upstairs in the hospital, George Elias Yusef, 63, slept on his right side, shrapnel wounds visible across his upper arm and his back. A computer programmer during Hussein's rule, Yusef had lost his job during the war and was hired as a night receptionist at the Mount Lebanon Hotel, said his wife, Samira Jazrawi, 50.

She said he survived only because he had been called to a guest's room to fix the television set. "I thought he'd been killed," said Jazrawi, her eyes filled with tears. "Only God and the Virgin Mary saved his life, because he's a religious man and he always fasts."

Chan reported from Baghdad. Special correspondent Emad Zainal contributed from Basra.



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