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.
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