Iraq contractors killed in ambush

Attackers ambushed and killed two American contractors working for Blackwater Security Consulting south of the Iraqi capital, the US Embassy and security officials said today.

Embassy spokesman Bob Callahan said the attack occurred yesterday on the main road to Hillah, south of Baghdad. He did not say exactly where.

“I can confirm that two American employees of Blackwater Security were killed early yesterday afternoon on the road to Hillah when an IED exploded next to their vehicle, Callahan said.

An IED is a military acronym for an improvised explosive devise, or homemade bomb used frequently by insurgents to attack US troops, their allies and Iraqi forces.

Another American Blackwater employee “was injured and is being treated at the military hospital in the Green Zone. His injuries are not life threatening,” Callahan said.

No other details were immediately available, and officials at the firm’s headquarters at Blackwater USA in Moyock, North Carolina, could not reached for comment.

The Americans were believed to be travelling in a convoy that included a black four-wheel drive Chevrolet Suburban, a foreign security official in Baghdad said on condition of anonymity.

Blackwater Security Consulting helps provide diplomatic security for US State Department officials in Iraq, according to their Web site.

In March 2004, four Blackwater employees were killed in the turbulent city of Fallujah, and two of the corpses were hung from a bridge, triggering a bloody three-week siege of the restive Sunni Muslim city west of Baghdad soon afterward.

Foreign contractors are often targeted by anti-US guerrillas. At least 232 American civilian security and reconstruction contractors were killed in Iraq up to the end of 2004, according to the Washington-based Brookings Institution.