Iraqis cheer crash of British helicopter

A British military helicopter crashed in Basra today, and Iraqis hurled stones at British troops and set fire to at least one armoured vehicle that rushed to the scene. Clashes broke out between British troops and Shiite militias, police and witnesses said.

Police Captain Mushtaq Khazim said the helicopter was apparently shot down in a residential district in the city.

He said the four-member crew was killed, but British officials would say only that there were “casualties”.

British forces backed by armoured vehicles went to the area but were met by a hail of stones from the crowd of at least 250 people, who jumped for joy and raised their fists as a plume of thick smoke rose into the air from the crash site.

The crowd also set at least one British armoured vehicle on fire, apparently with a rocket-propelled grenade, but the British soldiers inside escaped unhurt, witnesses said. British fired weapons into the air in an effort to disperse the crowd.

Shooting broke out between the British and armed militiamen, and at least two people, including a child, were killed, Khazim said.

Crowds chanted “we are all soldiers of al-Sayed”, a reference to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, an ardent foe of the presence of foreign troops in Iraq.

Later the crowd began to scatter as they heard an explosion. roups of men set fire to tires in the streets and the situation remained tense.

The chaotic scene was widely shown on Iraqi state television and on the Al-Jazeera satellite station.

In violence elsewhere, a suicide bomber wearing an Iraqi army uniform entered an Iraqi base in Tikrit and detonated an explosives belt, killing an Iraqi lieutenant colonel, a major and a lieutenant, and wounding a lieutenant colonel, said Iraqi Defence Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Aziz Mohammed Jassim.

The US command also announced that an American soldier was killed by the roadside bomb in Baghdad on Friday. At least 2,417 members of the US military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003.

Britain has about 8,000 troops based in the mostly Shiite Basra area, and southern Iraq has long been much less violent than Baghdad and western Iraq where Sunni Arab-led insurgents and al Qaida in Iraq launch many attacks against Iraqi civilians and US and Iraqi forces.

But Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiite religious leader, hasn’t always been able to keep growing anti-coalition fervour among Shiite radicals under control.

The bomber in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit targeted a group of Iraqi army recruits who had just finished their training and were being dispatched to another area of Iraq, Jassim said. Officials in Tikrit said the bomber apparently told guards that he wanted to see one of the officers and was admitted to the base without being searched.

A roadside bomb also exploded today near a Polish convoy in Diwaniyah south of Baghdad, wounding three soldiers, Poland’s Defence Ministry said. Poland has about 900 troops in south-central Iraq, where it commands an international force.