November 25, 2003	Tuesday	Ramazan 29, 1424

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TIKRIT, Nov 24: US troops shot dead a person in a vehicle that was trying to ram a checkpoint and killed another person who attacked them north of Baghdad, a US military spokesman said on Monday.

US “soldiers fired warning shots as an oncoming vehicle attempted to crash through a traffic checkpoint at Dawar on Sunday morning,” said Lieutenant Colonel Bill MacDonald, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division.

“The driver failed to stop after he was warned. The soldiers fired at the vehicle and disabled the vehicle. One person in the vehicle was killed and one was wounded,” MacDonald said.

Dawar is 150 kilometres from the Iraqi capital.

In a separate incident, US troops were attacked and returned fire, killing one person while searching an orchard on Sunday near Balad, 70 kilometres north of Baghdad, Lt-Col MacDonald said.

“They returned fire, killing the person who attacked them,” he said.

FAIDAH: Three US soldiers were injured in the northern Kurdish village of Faidah on Monday when their Humvee crashed with a Turkish oil tanker, Iraqi police said.

The US army could not immediately confirm the accident.

The tanker’s driver and a passenger travelling with him, both of them Turks, were also injured, said traffic police captain Saif Samer Omar.

The accident took place 20 kilometers south of Dohuk, he said.

It was the second accident involving a collision between two vehicles this week.

Meanwhile, a US soldier was wounded on Monday morning in a bomb attack on his convoy in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a US military spokeswoman said.

“We had an attack at 10:20 am (0720 GMT) on a convoy in downtown Mosul with IED (improvised explosive device) and small arms fire,” the spokeswoman said.—AFP