US troops kill Iraqi parents and teenager

At least three Iraqis were killed and a child was injured after American soldiers stormed a tiny one-room house north of Baghdad and opened fire.

Police said a couple and their 19-year-old son were shot dead in their beds late last night.

But the US military said soldiers came under fire and killed two suspected members of a terrorist cell in self-defence. It said it did not know who shot the woman or the child.

The US military reported only three dead, but Iraqi police said two young girls were wounded and one died today at a hospital.

It was the second time in as many days that the US military admitted involvement in the death of Iraqi civilians.

Yesterday, the military said it had accidentally killed nine Iraqi civilians, including a child, in an airstrike targeting al-Qaida in Iraq south of Baghdad.

In both cases, the military acknowledged involvement in the killings only in response to media inquiries.

Both incidents raised fresh concerns about the military’s ability to distinguish friend from foe – and to protect civilians in the line of fire – in its stepped-up campaign to uproot insurgents from Sunni areas around Baghdad.

The latest deaths occurred in the village of Adwar, 10 miles south of Tikrit. The predominantly Sunni area is home to many former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and has been the site of frequent US raids against Sunni militants.

The US military said troops came under small arms fire while entering the building, and soldiers shot dead two men inside. A woman was killed and one child was injured, but it was unclear who shot them.

It said the night-time raid was based on intelligence gleaned from an informant - opening the possibility that the military was misled into targeting the family, perhaps out of local Iraqis’ tribal or sectarian motives.

The incident remains under investigation, the military said.

A cousin of the victims, Kareem Talea Hamad, 20, said he watched the killings from his house across the street, and gave a different account of events.

Mr Hamad said US soldiers opened the door to the small brick house and immediately opened fire, killing its unarmed residents: father Ali Hamad Shihab, 55, his wife Naeimah Ali Sulaiman, 40, and their son Diaa Ali, who was a member of a US-backed neighbourhood watch group.

Such groups, composed mainly of Sunni fighters partnering with the US to oust al-Qaida from their home towns, have been targeted by other militants because of their alliance with US and Iraqi forces.

A surviving daughter, Nawal Ali, 16, said she was inside the house at the time of the raid, and that an Iraqi interpreter working for US forces tried to stop the American soldiers killing her parents.

In Taji, north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives today near the convoy of a sheik working with US forces, killing two of his followers.

Those killed were members of the Taji Awakening Council, a group of Sunni tribesmen who joined forces with the Americans to fight al-Qaida.