One dies after grenade attack, US soldier a suspect

5.50pm

UPDATE - One US soldier was killed and 12 were wounded in a grenade attack at a tented command centre in Kuwait today, CNN reported, and the military said one of their own comrades had been held as a suspect.

Time magazine correspondent Jim Lacey told CNN by telephone from Camp Pennsylvania, the Kuwait base for the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, that the soldier had died of his injuries. "We're allowed to talk about it," he said.

Brigade commander Col Ben Hodges said from the camp that a grenade had been rolled into each of three tents at the command area, described by another military spokesman as the "nerve center" of the brigade's operations.

Lacey, who witnessed the attack, described scenes of what he called chaos and carnage when the grenades exploded, saying soldiers thought they had come under Iraqi missile attack. Footage showed soldiers running around wearing gas masks.

"A suspect was taken into custody following the attack on elements of the 101st Airborne Division. The suspect is a soldier assigned to the division," US Central Command, which is running the war in Iraq, earlier said in a statement.

A Pentagon official had no information on the reported fatality in the attack.

Lacey identified the suspect as a sergeant from an engineering unit attached to the division, which was preparing to move into Iraq to join the invasion when the attack took place. He described the man as disgruntled and said he had been "acting strange."

A photograph shown on CNN portrayed the suspect bare-headed and kneeling outside a tent in his desert fatigues with his hands cuffed behind his back. A flak-jacketed soldier stood over him with a weapon.

US Central Command said the attack took place at around 1.30am (Kuwait time) and reported 13 soldiers wounded.

Helicopters evacuated 11 of them to field hospitals in the area and two were treated at the scene, the Central Command statement said. It said the attack was under investigation by the US Army Criminal Investigation Command.

Central Command gave no details of the wounded. It did not name the suspect or comment on a possible motive.

Lacey said the suspect had an "Arabic sounding name" but was not able to confirm a Fox News television report that the man was a Muslim American.

He said the suspect had apparently been told he would not be moving into Iraq with the brigade, but added: "I haven't heard of anything special that he was planning."

Camp Pennsylvania is one of the desert bases from where US forces have launched an invasion to try to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Thousands of US troops have been based in Kuwait since the end of the 1991 Gulf War. They have been targeted several times in recent months by militants whom Kuwaiti authorities say may have links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

Kuwait is a key US ally and its government is publicly grateful to Washington for leading the 1991 war that drove out occupying Iraqi troops from the oil-rich country, but there have been concerns of rising anti-American sentiment.

Meanwhile Patriot missiles brought down a missile, believed to be Iraqi, which flew close to a US military camp in northern Kuwait early today, US military officers said.

Reuters correspondent Kieran Murray, with units of the 101st Airborne Division at Camp New York, said there had been no air raid warning but the missile was shot out of the air.

Several explosions rocked Baghdad before dawn today, including one massive blast that shook the ground in the center of the city, a Reuters correspondent in the city said.

The Iraqi capital has been pounded since Thursday by wave after wave of US and British plane and missile attacks.

Correspondent Samia Nakhoul said planes could be heard overhead as the blasts hit the city.

In another development US forces in Iraq have yet to find any evidence of the suspected chemical or biological weapons that prompted the invasion, a US general said.

Gen Stanley McChrystal, vice director for operations on the US military's Joint Staff, also told a briefing that none of the missiles fired by Iraq so far in the war had been a Scud.

Scud missiles, along with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, are among the arms that Iraq was barred from possessing by UN resolutions after the 1991 Gulf War.

President Bush and his ally British Prime Minister Tony Blair accuse Iraq of having violated the resolutions and say President Saddam Hussein could provide weapons of mass destruction to groups like al-Qaeda.

Asked if any Scuds had been found by the US-British forces that have invaded Iraq, McChrystal said:

"To my knowledge, we have not discovered any to this point," adding: "So far there have been no Scuds launched, which is very positive today."

Asked if any signs of chemical or biological weapons had been found, the general replied: "We have found no caches of weapons of mass destruction to date."

Iraq says it has destroyed all its stocks of chemical and biological weapons.

Earlier today US Marines battled Iraqi forces around the southern city of Basra and America's Gulf commander vowed to conduct a campaign of overwhelming force.

US infantry said they had captured a vital bridge over the Euphrates river, needed for their push toward Baghdad, but elsewhere invading troops met some stiffer-than-expected resistance as they pushed deeper into Iraq.

By contrast to opposition on the ground, US and British forces had dominance of the skies, striking Baghdad with a devastating aerial assault that set off giant fireballs, thunderous explosions and glowing clouds.

Warplanes targeted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's palace on the banks of the River Tigris, government and military targets and other symbols of his rule. The precise scale of Iraqi fatalities from the bombing and the hostilities was not clear.

US Army General Tommy Franks, commander of the invasion, said his forces were using munitions on a "scale never before seen" and predicted that victory was certain.

"This will be a campaign unlike any other in history. A campaign characterised by shock, by surprise, by flexibility... and by the application of overwhelming force," he said in his first briefing since the attack on Iraq began on Thursday.

Iraq denounced the attackers as criminals and appealed to the United Nations to halt the invasion "unconditionally."

After a day of fierce fighting, US Marines said they had defeated Iraqi forces on the outskirts of the oil city of Basra, some 340 miles southeast of Baghdad, taking hundreds of prisoners in the process. "It's definitely a big victory," US Marine Captain Andrew Bergen told Reuters.

Further north, in the city of Nassiriya, US troops forging a path to Baghdad secured a bridge over the Euphrates, dislodging Iraqi forces who had slowed their advance.

After two days of skirmishes, Marines said they had won control of Umm Qasr, Iraq's only deep-water port which lies close to the Kuwaiti border, despite pockets of resistance.

"Both the new and the old ports are secure," Marine Captain Rick Crevier, one of the commanders of the effort to capture Umm Qasr's twin port facilities, said.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq