Saddam terrorists blamed for attacks on US contractors

Terrorists and remnants of Saddam Hussein’s former regime were blamed today for the "horrific" attacks on four American contractors whose mutilated and burned bodies were dragged through the streets of the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

“It is offensive, it is despicable the way these individuals have been treated,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.

McClellan said “the best way to honour those that lost their lives” was to continue with efforts to bring democracy to Iraq.

US State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said the contractors, all men, “were trying to make a difference and to help others”.

US officials did not identify the dead or the nature of their work because the next of kin had not yet been notified.

In Fallujah today, shops and schools were open and there was no sound of any fighting a day after the frenzied crowds burned, mutilated and dragged the bodies through the streets and strung two of them up from a bridge after rebels ambushed their vehicles.

A handful of Iraqi police manned their standard roadside checkpoints and there was no sign of US troops.

Some of the bodies of the four Americans were loaded on to the back of a donkey-pulled wooden cart last night and paraded through Fallujah’s streets as crowds clapped and whistled. It was not clear where the bodies were early today.

Five US soldiers were also killed when a bomb exploded under their armoured vehicle north of Fallujah, about 35 miles west of Baghdad, making it the bloodiest day for Americans in Iraq since January 8.

Chanting “Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans”, residents cheered after the grisly assault on two four-wheel-drive civilian vehicles left both cars in flames.

Residents in Fallujah said insurgents attacked the contractors with small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades.

After the attack, a jubilant crowd of civilians, none of whom appeared to be armed, gathered to celebrate, dragging the bodies through the street and hanging two of them from the bridge.

Many of those in the crowd were excited young boys who shouted slogans in front of television cameras.

Associated Press Television News pictures showed one man beating a charred corpse with a metal pole. Others tied a yellow rope to a body, hooked it to a car and dragged it down the main street of town. Two blackened and mangled corpses were hung from the green, iron bridge spanning the Euphrates River.

“The people of Fallujah hung some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep,” resident Abdul Aziz Mohammed said. Some corpses were dismembered, he said.

The abuse and mutilation of the contractors’ corpses was similar to the scene more than a decade ago in Somalia, when a mob dragged corpses of US soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu, eventually leading to the American withdrawal from the African nation. The images were broadcast worldwide and became the subject of the book and movie Black Hawk Down.

In Baghdad, US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said the coalition would not be deterred from its mission to rebuild Iraq, and that numerous reconstruction projects were moving forward nationwide even though attention was focused on the attacks.