Baghdad said on Monday that an Iraqi civilian was killed and three others wounded in US-British attacks in northern Iraq, said reports.
The attack came on the same day that Iraq claimed the downing of a US spy plane, which was reported missing by the US military.
Footage of the plane wreckage was broadcast Monday evening on Iraqi television.
"Enemy planes, coming from Turkish airspace, bombarded civilian installations in northern Iraq, killing one Iraqi and wounding three others," said the official Iraqi News Agency (INA), cited by AFP.
Anti-aircraft defense systems fired back and "obliged the enemy planes to take flight toward their base in Turkey," INA said, quoting a military spokesman.
The report did not say where the victims were found, but indicated that the "enemy planes had carried out their raids on the (northern) provinces of Dohuk, Erbil and Nineveh."
From Ankara, the US military confirmed it had bombed northern Iraq in response to Iraqi fire during routine patrols over the no-fly zone in the region.
Aircraft dropped "ordnance on elements of the Iraqi integrated air defense system" after Iraqis fired anti-aircraft artillery from sites north of Mosul, the Germany-based US European Command said in a statement, cited by AFP.
The jets returned safely to their base in Incirlik in Turkey's southern province of Adana, the statement added.
The bombing followed the disappearance earlier of the unmanned US surveillance plane in a similar exclusion zone over southern Iraq.
INA earlier reported from Baghdad that Iraqi anti-aircraft forces had shot down a US spy plane in the region of the southern port city of Basra.
Later, Iraq said that "the reconaissance plane was hit at 9:40am local time, after having flown over the regions of Um Qasr and Shuaiba, in the province of Basra," 550 kilometers (340 miles) south of Baghdad.
Although the INA report did not say what type of aircraft had been hit, the agency said it carried "high-tech intelligence gathering equipment that the United States used in its aggression against Yugoslavia."
"It was operating in southern Iraq to gather information on our strategic sites and our anti-aircraft defenses," INA said.
Footage of the pulverized plane was broadcast Monday night on Iraqi television.
The clip showed the wreckage -- including a plane engine and electrical wires -- in a desert area, along with a metallic piece with the inscription "property of the United States Air Force."
In Washington, the US military conceded the first loss ever of an unmanned US spy plane over Iraq, AFP and Al Jazeera satellite TV reported.
"An unarmed Predator, an unmanned aircraft on a routine mission and a supportive operation was reported missing in southern Iraq at about 2:00am eastern time today," Lieutenant Dave Lapan said.
The Predator RQ-1 is one of the US planes stationed in the Gulf and also has been widely used in the Balkans.
Lapan, who said there were no plans to recover the aircraft, said the military needed to determine whether the plane had "crashed or been shot down."
But Lapan denied the strike on northern Iraq was related to the missing spy plane, according to the agency.
"It is not connected to the aircraft crash," he told AFP. "It was in response to direct Iraqi action."
The United States, Britain, and France set up "no-fly zones" after the Gulf War. France left the coalition after the US and Britain bombed Iraq in December, 1998.
The UN has not authorized the no-fly zones, which are ostensibly there to prevent Iraqi attacks on Kurdish and Shiite Muslim minorities.
Iraq has from the beginning said the no-fly zones are illegal because no Security Council resolution authorizes them, and because Iraq did not give up any territory in ceasefire agreements.
The US and UK maintain their warplanes at Incirlik airbase in Turkey, which in the last decade has carried out a large-scale war to maintain control over its own sizeable Kurdish minority – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
