Mon, Apr 26, 2004 page1

• Rocket attack kills four in Mosul

  UNREST A hospital and hotel were targeted in Mosul, while in Basra officials moved ahead with investigations into Saturday's abortive raid on the port's oil terminals

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  Katyusha rockets hit a hospital, a hotel and a police facility in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul yesterday, killing two hospital and two hotel workers and wounding 13 people, police said.

  The attacks came as the leaders of Australia and Bulgaria visited their troops in Iraq yesterday, in a show of support for the US-led coalition that follows announcements from Spain, Honduras and the Dominican Republic that they plan to pull their forces out.

  Also, the US death toll from Saturday's foiled seaborne raids on Iraq's main southern oil terminals rose by one yesterday to three.

  Mosul police said a rocket slammed into the Salam Hospital, killing two women staff and wounding 10 other people.

  Less than an hour later, a second rocket hit Ashour Hotel in the city center, causing extensive damage and wounding three people. Two of the wounded, both hotel workers, died shortly afterwards in hospital.

  A third rocket struck a police vehicle maintenance department next to police headquarters in southern Mosul's Wadi Hajar district, wounding two policemen.

  US troops later shot at three gunmen in a car who fired at a patrol in the city, killing one of the attackers, while the other two fled, police at the scene said.

  American troops found two assault rifles and a grenade launcher in their car, witnesses said.

  Meanwhile, the foiled raids on Iraq's main southern oil terminals drew comparisons yesterday with attacks against US and French vessels off Yemen which were blamed on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

  Analysts said Saturday's raid on the oil terminals off the southern city of Basra had all the hallmarks of an October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed and 39 wounded as the US destroyer refuelled off the southern Yemeni port of Aden.

  Another attack by a boat filled with explosives hit the French oil tanker Limburg off Yemen two years later and was also blamed on the network.

  Asked if he believed al-Qaeda was responsible for Saturday's strikes, Iraq's interim oil minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum said: "This is my feeling. I don't have any evidence for that.

  "We believe that those who are carrying out these terrorist actions don't want peace for Iraq. They don't want a prosperous future for Iraqis. We have heard of foreign elements in these attacks," he said.

  Basra's deputy governor in charge of security, General Ali Chani, meanwhile noted the "resemblance between the [Basra] attacks and those of al-Qaeda" against the USS Cole and the Limburg.

  "The method is the same but I don't think the same people are responsible," he said.

  Two US sailors were killed Saturday as an eight-strong interception team prepared to board one of the suicide boats as it neared the exclusion zone around the Iraqi oil facility at Khor al-Amaya.

  "As the eight-member boarding team approached the dhow in a rigid hull inflatable boat [RHIB], the dhow exploded, flipping the RHIB and throwing the crew into the water, killing two and wounding four," the US Navy said early yesterday in a statement issued in Bahrain, where the US Fifth Fleet is based.

  Another two small speedboats headed to the main Basra terminal, 7km away, but security forces opened fire and the boats exploded before they reached four oil tankers.

  One exploded just 7m from one of the tankers, causing a power cut and halting the loading of oil, a port official said.

  A third member of a US interception team died yesterday from wounds sustained in the attack, a US Navy spokesman said.

  "Three are now dead, two US navy and one US Coast Guard," said Navy Commander James Graybeal, a spokesman for the Fifth Fleet, yesterday in Bahrain.

  The US Coast Guard member died from his injuries at the Kuwait Military Hospital, he said.

  US military officials in the Gulf were sending a team of investigators to try to determine the launching point of the attacks, he said.

  Asked whether the attackers arrived at the port by traveling from inside Iraq or from Iran or Kuwait, Graybeal said, "That's what were trying to determine."

  It was the first time since last spring's US-led invasion that anti-coalition insurgents had used suicide bombers to strike at oil facilities off Iraq's southern coast.

  Previously insurgents had concentrated their attacks on Iraq's northern oilfields, repeatedly hitting the main export pipeline to Turkey in a bid to stop desperately needed hard currency revenues.

  That pipeline passes through predominantly Sunni Muslim areas north of Baghdad, where the Iraq insurgency has been at its most ferocious since the ouster of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime.

  By contrast, Basra is Shiite-dominated and until this month had been relatively docile in its approach to the US-led occupation.

  Bahr al-Ulloum said that the Al-Basra Oil Terminal will open today at the soonest.

  The Al-Basra terminal unloads up to 900,000 barrels a day of Iraq's total current exports of around 1.6 million barrels per day, he said.

  The minister would not say how much that production was worth.

  In other developments, Australian Prime Minister John Howard's surprise trip coincided with the country's main veterans' commemoration, which honors troops who fought in World War I's ill-fated Gallipoli campaign.

  Accompanied by the commander of coalition ground forces, US Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Howard attended a ceremony at Baghdad International Airport to mark Anzac Day.

  Also traveling to Iraq yesterday was Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov, who visited his country's 485 troops.

  Parvanov's trip came two days after a Bulgarian soldier was killed in the city of Karbala, the sixth since the war began.

  Parvanov also met Polish General Mieczyslaw Bieniek, the commander of the 9,500-strong international force that patrols a swath of south-central Iraq.

  Lieutenant Colonel Robert Strzelecki, a spokesman for the force, said Parvanov promised that the Bulgarian contingent will continue its mission and also said he was "interested in seeing greater security for the base."

  Also See Story:

  Howard stays with soldiers in Iraq for Gallipoli service
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