Rockets hit hotel as soldiers killed

EXPLOSIONS and gunfire erupted last night outside hotels housing foreigners and journalists in downtown Baghdad, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.

Security guards at the Palestine hotel said two rockets hit the outside of the nearby Sheraton hotel. There was no indication of a fire inside the Sheraton, although a palm tree burned outside.

The fire was believed to have been caused by one of several projectiles that landed in the compound surrounded by a concrete wall. Tracers streaked across the night sky.

Bursts of automatic gunfire were heard in the street between the two hotels for about 10 minutes after the explosions.

An American soldier said windows in the Sheraton were shattered and the main lobby was filled with smoke and debris. Several shaken Westerners emerged from the hotel, the unidentified soldier said.

Meanwhile, two American soldiers were killed and two others were wounded in separate attacks involving roadside bombs yesterday, and 20 Iraqis were arrested in the north in operations against those suspected of planting explosives.

US authorities raised the security alert in the heavily guarded Green Zone after an improvised bomb was found in front of a restaurant there.

One American soldier died when a bomb exploded near his convoy late on Wednesday outside the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah. Two other soldiers were wounded.

Another was killed and an Iraqi interpreter wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol with a roadside bomb near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, the command said.

Four Marines and three Iraqi soldiers were injured this week in an operation to crush insurgents south of Baghdad.

About 240 detainees, meanwhile, were released from US and Iraqi custody yesterday - including a prominent supporter of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It was the fourth round of releases under a joint US-Iraqi review process set up following the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in a continuing effort to reduce the inmate population and free those deemed not to be a security threat.