US troops 'kill Iraqi attackers'

Insurgents continue to mount attacks

US forces say they killed eight suspected insurgents after a drive-by attack in central Iraq on Tuesday.

Major Josslyn Aberle said US soldiers patrolling south-west of the city of Samarra were shot at by people in passing cars and returned fire.

On Wednesday, at least two foreigners were killed and two wounded when gunmen fired on their vehicles near Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's home town.

Reuters news agency said two of the victims were Pakistanis and one a Turk.

Again in Samarra, US forces detained four relatives of the most wanted member of Saddam Hussein's regime still at large, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri.

The former vice-president, one of Saddam Hussein's right-hand men, is believed by the Americans to be directing much of the resistance to US-led occupying forces in central Iraq.

Meanwhile, at least two people were killed and more than 20 injured in a car bomb attack outside a police station in the central Iraqi town of Baquba.

Samarra, Tikrit and Baquba are all in an area known as the Sunni triangle, where resistance to the American-led occupation is strong.

Cars destroyed

Tuesday's attacks involved people firing from a convoy of eight vehicles, Major Aberle said.

Two cars were destroyed while the six others were seized and their 26 occupants were arrested, she added.

Major Aberle described the way the Iraqis had initially opened fire on the US troops as a "drive-by shooting".

"The attackers fired on the soldiers with automatic weapons. They attempted to escape after the initial confrontation," she said.

Major Aberle also said that a large weapons cache - including 170 mortar bombs - was discovered outside Samarra on Tuesday by US troops, who detained one person.

Seven Iraqis believed to have been stealing fuel from a pipeline were killed by US forces near Samarra on Sunday.

Safe houses

The four men held after a dawn raid in Samarra are all thought to be nephews of the former vice-president, Mr al-Douri, who has a $10m bounty on his head.

Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri has so far eluded a US hunt for him Iraq's most wanted

American forces suspect they had been sheltering him in a series of safe houses.

Lieutenant-Colonel David Poirier said the men arrested had been "enablers" for Mr al-Douri and they had good information on his whereabouts.

"We think that [the raid] brought us one step closer to finding him," he told Reuters news agency.

Wednesday also saw the coalition announce the capture of another of the 55 "most wanted" former regime officials.

Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, a former regional Baath Party chairman and militia commander who was number 54 on the list, was arrested on Sunday in the Ramadi area, west of Baghdad.

'Suicide attack'

The Baquba bomb is thought by coalition officials to have been a suicide attack.

A police officer at the scene of the blast said a car sped towards the police station moments before the explosion.

"I saw the remains of the car driver all over the place and the building was severely damaged," said Haidar Ismail.

Witnesses said the force of the blast threw scores of people to the ground.

The BBC's Alastair Leithead, in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, says the attack appears to be another attempt to destabilise the new police force being assembled by the coalition.

At least five people died last week in a blast outside a mosque in Baquba.

There has been a spate of attack on Iraqi police stations in recent months.