Three US soldiers killed in Iraq suicide attack

Three US soldiers were killed and six others injured when a suicide bomber collapsed part of a road bridge in Iraq today.

The soldiers were at a checkpoint guarding the crossing and blocking traffic on Iraq’s main north-south artery.

US military officials said engineers were being dispatched with bulldozers and other heavy equipment to clear the highway, which was partially blocked by debris from the overpass. An Iraqi interpreter also was wounded in the attack, according to the statement.

Donald Campbell, a 40-year-old Briton with the private security firm Armour Group International, and his colleagues were in a passing convoy and worked with a US Army quick reaction force for some 45 minutes to pull trapped men from the rubble, scrambling over the fallen concrete.

US armoured vehicles provided cover fire from their cannons after the bombing, which occurred in the area dubbed the “triangle of death” for its frequent Sunni insurgent attacks.

The blast dropped one of two sections of the “Checkpoint 20” bridge crossing over the north-south expressway, six miles east of Mahmoudiya.

It appeared that a northbound suicide driver stopped and detonated his vehicle beside a support pillar, said Lt. Col. Garry Bush, an Army munitions officer who was in the convoy, which also carried an Associated Press reporter and photographer.

A US Army checkpoint and a tent structure, apparently a rest area, fell into the shattered concrete. The crossing was believed to have been closed to all but military traffic at the time.