Two US security contractors were killed and a third wounded in a roadside bomb attack south of the Iraqi capital, the US Embassy said yesterday.
The three were working for Blackwater Security, a North Carolina-based contracting firm that provides security for US State Department officials in Iraq. They were attacked on the main road to Hillah, south of Baghdad, US Embassy spokesman Bob Callahan said.
In Sharqat, 260km northwest of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle on Saturday outside the house of the town's chief of special police forces, police Colonel Jassim al-Jubouri said in Tikrit, further south. Four people were killed and several others were injured, he said.
In other violence, a US soldier was gunned down late Saturday in a small arms fire attack in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, 360km northwest of Baghdad, the US command said Sunday.
The death brought to at least 1,514 the number of members of the US military who've died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Foreign contractors, too, are often targeted by anti-US guerrillas. At least 232 US civilian security and reconstruction contractors were killed in Iraq up to the end of last year, according to the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
The Blackwater employees killed Saturday were in the last vehicle in a four-vehicle convoy and were traveling to Hillah from Baghdad, Callahan said.
The road south traverses an area known as the "Triangle of Death" because of the frequency of insurgent attacks.
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