BAIJI, Jan 3: Eight corpses, including those of two children, were pulled on Tuesday from the rubble of a house in northern Iraq after it was bombed the previous night by US aircraft.
The air strike came as a team of international monitors started to review contested results from Iraq’s December general elections following accusations of fraud by Sunni-based and secular parties.
The US military confirmed it attacked a house in Baiji, 200 kilometres north of Baghdad, on Monday after an unmanned drone spotted three men planting a roadside bomb and then fleeing into the building.
“The individuals were assessed as posing a threat to Iraqi civilians and coalition forces, and the location of the three men was relayed to close air support pilots,” said US military spokesman Lt Col Barry Johnson.
“Coalition forces employed precision-guided munitions on the structure,” he said, reading from a statement.
Ghadban Nahd Hassan, 56, whose family members were killed in the attack, said 14 people were in the house when it was hit.
“I was with some friends in a small shop 100 metres away from the house when I heard the bombing around 9.30pm,” Ghadban Hassan said.
“I rushed over to see. My house was destroyed and there was smoke everywhere,” he said, adding that he heard the plane responsible for the attack.
Rescue workers recovered the bodies of a nine-year-old boy, an 11-year-old girl, along with those of three women and three men from the debris, Mr Hassan said.
Two more women and an eight-year-old boy were found badly injured but alive.
Another three people were still missing.
Mr Hassan, who runs a gravel-making firm, said he had no idea why his home in an industrial part of the restive town was bombed.
Hamad Hamud al Qaisi, the governor of Salaheddin province, said he would demand an official investigation into the attack.
US aircraft regularly target buildings believed to house guerillas, along with weapons caches or locations thought to conceal booby-traps.
The US military increasingly relies on air power in Iraq. The number of air strikes rose from an average of about 25 a month last January to 120 in November, according to a tally published by the Washington Post newspaper.
ELECTION COMPLAINTS: Away from the violence, four members of the International Mission For Iraqi Elections, an independent body sent to study complaints about the Dec 15 election, arrived in Baghdad to begin work.
They joined three other colleagues already on the ground, said one of them.
The team comprises five election experts — including two from the Arab League, one from Canada and another representing the European Union — as well as members of the mission’s secretariat.
Over the next few days, the experts must decide whether complaints of fraud in the poll — Iraq’s first for a permanent parliament since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 — are valid.
The country’s election commission is expected to announce the final results of the vote following the mission’s review.—AFP
