Roadside bomb kills two British security guards

TWO British civilian security guards were killed in Baghdad yesterday when a roadside bomb blew up their armour-plated 4X4 vehicle.

Another Briton in the Toyota Land Cruiser was injured when the blast turned the vehicle into an inferno near Assassins Gate, one of the main entrances to the Green Zone, which houses the coalition’s headquarters.

Two people died in a separate blast in Baghdad.

In the hours after the blast that killed the Britons, insurgents fired a series of rockets or mortar rounds in separate attacks around Baghdad.

There were no reports of casualties or damage.

Witnesses said several houses were hit, and a mortar shell damaged the roof of a girls’ primary school.

After the 4X4 explosion, American soldiers tried to pull the men from the shattered and blazing vehicle and quickly sealed off the area, said a witness, Kamel Raji.

“These deaths are shocking and they show the risks which British and other civilians have to take in order to assist the Iraqis,” Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said in Brussels.

In London, the Foreign Office confirmed the deaths and said 12 British civilians have died in Iraq since July last year. Last week, a British civilian worker was fatally shot while driving on a road between Mosul and Irbil in northern Iraq.

Andrew Harries, aged 33, worked for a security company.

Private security guards, most of them former soldiers, are earning up to stg£500 a day in Iraq.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the chief US military spokesman in Baghdad, said the blast was caused by a roadside bomb that exploded about 150 yards from a checkpoint outside the Green Zone.

Iraqi policeman Mohammed Naem, who saw the vehicle explode, said it was a bullet-proof Land Cruiser en route to the convention centre in the Green Zone.

It was the latest in a series of deadly assaults in the Iraqi capital. Earlier in the day, a man and a woman died when an explosion ripped apart their car near a Baghdad stadium.

In the northern city of Mosul mortar rounds exploded outside two cinemas and a grenade detonated outside a third cinema.

There were no casualties and there was only minor damage.

The US has blamed similar attacks on cinemas or liquor stores on Muslim extremists.