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US forces injure freed hostage, kill rescuing agent

Looking haggard and worn, freed hostage Giuliana Sgrena returned to Italy from Iraq yesterday hours after US troops fired on the car she was in, wounding her and killing an Italian intelligence officer with her.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was among the dignitaries at Rome's Ciampino Airport to welcome the journalist after her weeks in the hands of her captors and the final ordeal of the checkpoint shooting en route to Baghdad Airport.

Surrounded by relatives and military police, Sgrena, 56, was helped off the aircraft and put into an ambulance bound for a military clinic for an operation on her collarbone.

Her brother, Ivan Sgrena, told reporters she was very happy to be back in Italy, but was "very sorry and sad" about the death of intelligence officer Nicola Calipari, who Berlusconi said was killed when he threw himself over Sgrena to protect her from US fire.

Pier Scolari, the journalist's boyfriend, said she told him: "The most difficult moment was when I saw the person who had saved me die in my arms," according to the ANSA news agency.

Sgrena told colleagues from her newspaper Il Manifesto, who met her plane, that her captors "never treated me badly," ANSA reported.

Friday's shooting occurred shortly after Sgrena was released after a month held hostage in Iraq. She left Iraq after being discharged from a Baghdad hospital.

Gabriele Polo, Sgrena's editor, said her first words to him were "ciao" and "thank you."

He responded, "There's no reason for thanks," ANSA said.

The shrapnel removed from Sgrena's shoulder may have been a fragment of the fire that killed Calipari, he said.

The US military said the car Sgrena was riding in after her release was speeding as it approached a coalition checkpoint in western Baghdad on its way to the airport. It said soldiers shot into the engine block only after trying to warn the driver to stop by "hand and arm signals, flashing white lights and firing warning shots."

US troops took Sgrena to a US military hospital in Iraq, where shrapnel was removed from her left shoulder.

Sgrena was abducted on Feb. 4 by gunmen who blocked her car outside Baghdad University. Last month, she was shown in a video pleading for her life and demanding that all foreign troops -- including Italian forces -- leave Iraq.

The shooting came as a blow to Berlusconi, who has kept 3,000 troops in Iraq, and was likely to set off new protests in Italy, where tens of thousands have regularly demonstrated against the Iraq war. Sgrena's left-leaning newspaper vigorously opposed the conflict.

News of the shooting drew immediate criticism on Friday from Berlusconi's political foes, who were eager to attack the government for its staunch support of the war.

"Another victim of an absurd war," Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, leader of the Green Party, told the Apcom news agency.

Berlusconi summoned the US ambassador to Rome, Mel Sembler, who met with him for one hour.

"Given that the fire came from an American source, I called in the American ambassador," Berlusconi told reporters on Friday. "I believe we must have an explanation for such a serious incident, for which someone must take the responsibility."

US President George W. Bush called Berlusconi and expressed his regret in a five-minute conversation, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said on Friday night. Bush assured Berlusconi that the incident would be "fully investigated," he said.

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