US Troops Kill Another Iraqi Civilian at Checkpoint

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, April 01, 2003

US Troops Kill Another Iraqi Civilian at Checkpoint

US Marines shot dead an unarmed Iraqi driver at a military checkpoint in southern Iraq on Tuesday, just hours after seven women and children died in a similar incident.

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US Marines shot dead an unarmed Iraqi driver at a military checkpoint in southern Iraq on Tuesday, just hours after seven 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, 20 miles from Nassiriya, a city which has seen some of the fiercest fighting of the 13-day-old war.

Such incidents provide new fuel for Arab fury over the war to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

A couple of hours after daybreak, the man had driven his white pickup truck fast toward the roadblock on a main highway, apparently unaware of the barbed wire strewn across the road ahead, Marines told this correspondent at the scene.

As he drove straight through the coils of wire, the Marines sprayed his vehicle with bullets, killing the driver and hitting his one middle-aged passenger in the arms and legs. Marine medics worked by the side of the truck to save the man's life.

The truck was carrying no load and neither of the men in it was in uniform or armed, the Marines said.

On Monday afternoon American troops fired on a civilian car near Najaf, killing seven women and children, when it failed to stop at a desert checkpoint, US military officials said.

US troops have been on edge because of ambushes and a checkpoint suicide attack on Saturday which killed four of their colleagues near Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad.

The US military also said on Tuesday US 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.

Source: agencies

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