Four dead as US launch airstrike on Baghdad houses

US aircraft bombed houses at 2am today, killing four members of a family and wounding a guard at the house of a former Shiite politician, police said.

The houses were near the west Baghdad office of a leading member of a key Sunni political bloc. The US military said it was checking the report.

The attack hit residences near the offices of Saleh al-Mutlaq, a senior Sunni Arab politician of the National Dialogue Front, and the home of Salama al-Khafaji, a former Shiite politician who abandoned her residence after escaping an assassination attempt last year.

The wounded guard was watching her home, a police official in the Khadra district said.

A man at the scene of the attack said the air strike also killed a guard at al-Mutlaq's office, but the police could not confirm his account.

Television news pictures showed masses of rubble in the area and what appeared to be a long smear of blood where a body had been dragged across the floor of one of the buildings.

Walls in the buildings were pitted with what looked to be the impact of bullets and shrapnel.

The US military said later that six people were killed in the raid on a possible safe house for al-Qaida in Iraq.

American troops came under heavy gunfire and grenade launches from the building, the military said in a statement.

The US said ground forces raided the buildings, acting on intelligence reports that the location was used as a possible safe house for al-Qaida in Iraq.

One suspect was detained, the military said.

But Iraqi police described the incident as an airstrike, in which five people were killed.