Gunmen opened fire on a minibus, killing three Iraqi journalists and wounding nine other employees of a US-funded TV station in northeastern Iraq, police said.
According tio The AP, all the victims of the attack in the city of Baqouba, some 55 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, were employees of Diyala TV, said Sanaa al-Daghistani, the station's information director.
Police Capt. Mohammed Hadi identified the slain victims as Mohammed Farhan, Majeed Rashid and Nadia Shawkat.
Later in the day, American soldiers at a checkpoint shot dead an Iraqi working for Dubai-based Arab satellite television channel Al Arabiya and injured another as they drove through central Baghdad, Al Arabiya colleagues said, according to Reuters.
They said another car had raced toward the checkpoint, and the US soldiers then opened fire on both vehicles, killing cameraman Ali Abdulaziz and wounding correspondent Ali al-Khatib.
Elsewhere, mortars launched at a U.S. base near Baghdad killed two US troops and injured six others, the US Army said Thursday. U.S. soldiers responded to the attack in the town of Balad and detained occupants of a vehicle fleeing the area, a US statement said.
Meanwhile, Nouri Badran, the Iraqi interior minister, said Thursday the death toll from a bomb attack that destroyed a Baghdad hotel late Wednesday was six, contradicting the U.S. army's earlier estimate of 27 killed.
"So far it looks like a car bomb. The number of casualties is six dead, one of them British and five of them Iraqi," Badran said, according to Reuters.
© 2004 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
