BAGHDAD, Iraq – Twelve more Americans were killed in insurgent attacks across Iraq, military and diplomatic sources said Tuesday. The dead included an embassy official and three security contractors killed Monday morning in a suicide car bombing in the northern city of Mosul.
The latest American deaths raised the overall toll to 1,907, according to an Associated Press count.
Witnesses in Mosul said a lone driver smashed his red sedan into the second vehicle in a convoy of three SUVs, triggering an explosion. Stephen Eric Sullivan died instantly, according to a U.S. official in Baghdad who spoke on the condition that he not be named. Three private American security guards also were killed, the official said.
Also Tuesday, the U.S. military announced the deaths of four soldiers in two separate roadside bomb attacks in the city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, and the death of another soldier whose vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb 75 miles north of the capital. None of the soldiers’ names were released.
The military also said three soldiers died Friday while on patrol.
Reports of the rash of violence against Americans came as British and Iraqi officials offered widely contrasting public accounts of the circumstances that led to clashes Monday between British soldiers and Iraqi police in Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city. British armored vehicles smashed into a police station in an attempt to force the release of two British personnel who had been detained.
Haider Ebadi, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, called the British actions “very unfortunate” and said police acted correctly in detaining the men, who were behaving “very suspiciously.” They were wearing civilian clothes and asking for information in the streets, he said, but he would not elaborate further.
At first, Basra police said the men shot and killed a police officer.
Brig. John Lorimer said in a written statement that, under Iraqi law, the police were required to hand over the men to coalition forces.
Lorimer said the Iraqi interior minister had personally ordered the British personnel released, and that the order was ignored. Instead, he said, the two were handed over to a local Shiite Muslim militia controlled by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
“I became concerned about the safety of the soldiers after we received information that they had been handed over to militia elements,” he said. “As a result, I took the difficult decision to order entry to the Jamiat police station.”
British troops set a cordon around the station and were attacked with “firebombs and rockets by a violent and determined crowd,” Lorimer said. An armored vehicle plowed through one wall of a building, but the men were not found inside. They were later discovered in a house elsewhere in the city.
Police officials in Basra have said publicly that many of their officers’ primary loyalty is to Shiite militias such as the Badr organization.
Associated Press
Members of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry carry the remains of Capt. Lowell Miller II, 35, of Flint, Mich., during burial services Tuesday at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va. Miller was killed Aug. 31 by small-arms fire in Iskandariyah, Iraq.
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