August 19, 2003	Tuesday	Jumadi-us-Sani 20, 1424

BAGHDAD, Aug 18: Hundreds of thousands of sweltering Baghdadis faced another day without running water Monday after sabotage of a key water pipe in the east of the capital that came amid a spate of deadly attacks across Iraq.

With summer temperatures hovering around 50 degrees Celsius (122 F), up to 300,000 people were without drinking water for a second scorching day.

And with faltering infrastructure and increasing lawlessness in parts of Baghdad, the water shortage was likely to further wear down Iraqi patience with the occupying coalition forces.

The water-pipe attack on Sunday morning sent thousands of litres gushing into the streets of the eastern Baghdad suburb of Rasafa.

Floods in some streets created impromptu swimming pools for many Iraqis baking in the relentless heat.

Although engineers from Baghdad’s water company had stopped the gushing water by Monday morning, supplies had still not been returned to many homes in the area, residents said.

“Repair work has finished on the pipe,” said Abdul Karim Faisal, head of the team of technicians overseeing the repairs.

The team had restarted pumping water into the pipe — an operation that would be completed later in the afternoon — with a view to resuming distribution to local residents, Faisal said.

The repair operation was aided by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which lent machinery and pumping tools.

There was confusion over what caused the pipe to blow.

An ICRC spokeswoman said a rocket-propelled grenade hit the 1.6-metre (5.3-ft) diameter pipe at a open-air section near where the supply links the Sabah Missan pumping station with Rasafa.

And a local police officer said an explosive had detonated under the pipe.

But US military personnel guarding the repair work and one of the work team hired to fix the damage both said the hole did not look like one left by an explosion.

“It looks to me like it was just a crack,” said Captain David Reeder, one of a dozen US soldiers at the scene Monday morning. “We don’t see any evidence of a bomb. Normally there are pieces of metal everywhere. We don’t see that here.”

Works contractor Salwan Hanudi agreed. “It looks like someone had taken a knife and cut a hole in the pipe.”

The incident was one of three apparent attacks on civilian and military facilities over the weekend in what is being seen as a new anti-coalition resistance strategy of hitting targets that cause havoc and sew discontent among the population against occupying forces.

On Friday morning an attack on the main northern oil pipeline to Turkey halted the country’s essential export of crude.

The pipeline from Iraq’s northern oilfields around Kirkuk to the Turkish terminal of Ceyhan was attacked when unknown assailants blew up a section near Baiji.

Fires raged and up to 250,000 barrels per day were being lost after the blast.

American authorities said it could take weeks to repair the damage and get oil flowing again, hampering hopes of a speedy economic recovery for the war-ravaged country.

Elsewhere, a mortar attack on the notorious Abu Gharib prison Sunday left six Iraqis dead and 59 wounded.

And a Palestinian cameraman working for the British news agency Reuters was shot in the chest on Sunday afternoon by military personnel aboard a US tank while filming outside the prison on the outskirts of the Iraqi capital.

“We engaged an individual and after the engagement we found the individual was a journalist,” said Colonel Guy Shields, the top US military spokesman in Iraq.

“The incident is under investigation,” he added.

A Reuters spokesman said Monday the company was preparing to have the body of Mazen Dana, 43, repatriated.

Military chiefs would not be drawn on the possibility that a new anti-coalition campaign of civil disruption had been launched, but admitted that the attackers were becoming more sophisticated in their strikes. —AFP