10 killed by air raids in Iraq
'Pakistan Times' Wire Service

BASRA: An explosion destroyed a house in Iraq's southern city of Basra overnight and Iraqi police said on Monday ten people had died.

Foreign television footage showed rescue workers pulling bodies from the rubble of a house that had been completely destroyed.

Witnesses said they believed the blast was caused by a US air strike, but British forces, responsible for U.S. and British military activity in the area, denied any role and said they had no explanation for the blast.

Meanwhile, separate rocket attacks on the highly fortified Green Zone and a US military base in Baghdad have killed three US soldiers and wounded at least 31, a US military spokeswoman said.

The attacks occurred between 3.30 pm and 3.45 pm (1230 GMT and 1245 GMT), the spokeswoman said, asking not to be named.

"In the attack on the Green Zone, two rockets killed two US service personnel and wounded between 17 and 19," the spokeswoman said.

"At about the same time a rocket attack on a forward operating base in the Rustumiyah area (eastern Baghdad) killed another serviceman," she added.
At least 14 US soldiers were injured in the Rustumiyah attack.

US commanders say barrages of rockets and mortars are being fired daily from Sadr City, the eastern Baghdad bastion of the Mahdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Steve Stover said part of US operations now under way in the sprawling impoverished district were targeting "criminals" firing mortars and rockets into the Green Zone and surrounding Baghdad neighbourhoods.

A wave of rocket and mortar attacks on the Green Zone began two weeks ago and they have become an almost daily occurrence, scaring US personnel into sleeping in the embassy building rather than in their trailers, where two of their colleagues were killed in the first wave of attacks.

The latest deaths bring the US military's losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 4,017, according to a tally based on an independent website.●