A ferocious blaze raged for a third day at a giant oil pipeline in northern Iraq, and US military officials yesterday said it was too soon to say what triggered the fire. Earlier, Iraqi police officials blamed saboteurs.
The Danish army reported one of its soldier died after being shot during a gun battle with armed Iraqis whose truck had been stopped during a routine patrol near Basra in southern Iraq.
The soldier was the first Dane to be killed in Iraq since Denmark sent a contingent of about 400 soldiers this summer to join the occupation force in the Basra region.
Two Iraqis were killed in the shootout Saturday, one was wounded and six were arrested, the Danish army command said in Copenhagen.
In northern Baghdad overnight a big water main was hit by an explosion, flooding streets and cutting supplies to a part of the city.
Witnesses said they saw two men on the motorbike leaving a bag of explosives and detonating it minutes later in the early hours yesterday.
L. Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator of Iraq, said the country was losing US$7 million daily with the oil export pipeline out of operation.
The new Iraqi police commander had vowed on Saturday to pursue the "conspirators" behind the attack that halted oil exports to Turkey only days after they resumed, cutting off vital income for an economy in shambles.
The crumbling network of pipe had begun pumping oil to Turkey on Wednesday, and the explosion early Friday near Baiji, 200km northeast of Baghdad, cut it off completely, acting Iraqi oil minister Thamer al-Ghadaban said in the capital.
Police Brigadier General Ahmed Ibrahim, once imprisoned for speaking out against former president Saddam Hussein, was appointed Saturday to be the top Iraqi law enforcement official. He blamed the explosion on "a group of conspirators who received money from a particular party," which he didn't identify.
"With God's help, we will arrest those people and bring them to justice," Ibrahim said. "The damage inflicted on the pipeline is damage done to all Iraqi people."
But a US military spokesman said it was too soon to say whether the explosion was an accident or sabotage.
"Until it's cooled off, nobody can say exactly what happened," said Lieutenant Colonel William MacDonald, of the 4th Infantry Division based in Tikrit. People on the ground were still waiting to investigate the cause, he said.
Al-Ghadaban said it would take several days to get the pipeline working again.
"It is a large pipeline with large volume of crude oil," he said.
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