Six killed in US strikes on Fallujah

* Driver killed in suicide blast
* Aid group stops Iraq work after official kidnapped

FALLUJAH: US air raids destroyed buildings said to belong to Islamic militant Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi and other militant posts in on Wednesday where residents claimed a family of six were killed.

The military denied reports from the city that the bombardments had destroyed a teachers’ college and killed a family of six.

A pre-dawn raid targeted two Zarqawi safe houses in the northeast of the city, while a second air strike later took out “a known enemy command and control post” to the north, the army said. As for the later bombing, the army said it had monitored the area for 30 days and seen militants plant bombs along the roadside nearby and repave them.

“The same individuals were spotted wiring explosive devises near the area,” it said.

Meanwhile, Jordan has urged US and Iraqi forces to lift their siege to help ease the hardships of residents during Ramazan.

A suicide car bomb exploded on the road to Baghdad’s international airport on Wednesday but killed only the driver, while a roadside bomb blew up near a US vehicle but caused no casualties, the US army said. A few kilometres away, a roadside bomb exploded, damaging a tyre on a passing army vehicle but causing no casualties, the spokesman said. Four children were killed and 20 people injured when a car bomb exploded in the path of a US Army convoy near a nursery school in Samarra on Wednesday, medics and police said. The kidnapping of a British-Iraqi aid official might prompt her agency, Care International, to withdraw from Iraq, its director said on Wednesday.

The head of the agency’s operations in Iraq, Margaret Hassan, was abducted in Baghdad on Tuesday and she was later shown sitting anxiously alone in a video from her unidentified captors broadcast by an Arabic television station.

Meanwhile, an Iraqi man working as a building contractor for US forces in Baquba, 65 km north of Baghdad, was shot dead by gunmen who burst into his home on Tuesday night. Also, a 15-year-old boy was killed by crossfire in a gunfight between US troops and militants in Baquba, witnesses said.

Korean warning: On Wednesday, an Arabic Web site threatened to burn and demolish Seoul unless South Korea withdraws 2,800 troops — the third-largest coalition contingent in Iraq..

A US soldier pleaded guilty on Wednesday before a court martial to abusing prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, including forcing one to masturbate and photographing naked prisoners. Two Egyptian telecoms workers seized from their office in an upscale Baghdad neighbourhood last month were freed by their captors on Wednesday, their employer said. An Iraqi detainee has died in US custody at the Camp Bucca detention centre in southern Iraq, the military said in a statement on Wednesday. agencies

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