Missile may have hit Baghdad market, US admits

11.45am

WASHINGTON - US defence officials said an errant missile may have been responsible for the explosions that killed civilians in a residential district of Baghdad on Wednesday, but also said anti-aircraft artillery or missiles fired by the Iraqis may have been the cause.

Two blasts devastated a busy street in the Shaab district of Baghdad. Reuters correspondents counted 15 scorched corpses lying amid mangled cars and rubble from buildings. Iraqi witnesses blamed the explosions on a twin US missile attack.

"Is there a potential for an errant missile to go astray like a Tomahawk or something like that? Yes," a defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters.

Tomahawks are long-range cruise missiles fired from warships and guided to their targets by satellites.

The official said that after the incident, the US military went back and reviewed all the targeting in the Baghdad area during the time of the explosions "and we didn't drop a weapon anywhere close to that."

At the Pentagon, officials said they did not know the cause of the explosions and were investigating.

"Coalition forces did not target a marketplace nor were any bombs or missiles dropped or fired" in the Shaab district, Army Major General Stanley McChrystal, vice director for operations for the Joint Staff, told a Pentagon briefing.

"We don't know for a fact whether it was US or Iraqi. And we can't make any assumption on either at this point," he said. "We'll continue to look and see if we missed anything.

Another possibility was that Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery or an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile falling back to earth caused the explosions, McChrystal told reporters.

If a US missile or bomb was the cause, it would be the first known strike to hit an Iraqi residential area and cause substantial casualties since the United States and Britain launched their war on Iraq a week ago.

The US Central Command said aircraft attacked nine Iraqi surface-to-surface missile launch sites in Baghdad around 8pm yesterday (NZ time) but it was not known if any of the weapons struck the street where the civilians were killed.

McChrystal said none of the targets was within that area.

The US military, however, accused Iraq of placing weapons sites in the middle of residential districts.

"Most of the missiles were positioned less than 90 metres from homes. A full assessment of the operation is ongoing," a Central Command statement said.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq