BAGHDAD, Dec 13: The US military on Saturday confirmed the killing of an American soldier in a roadside bomb blast in Ramadi on Friday in which two more troops were injured while an Iraqi man was killed in Tikrit as it announced the death of another of its soldier who died of “non-hostile gunshot.”

Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in an interview to be published on Monday, lashed out against the US strategy of pre-emptive action and ruled out sending UN peacekeepers to Iraq, saying the country would need military aid for years to come.

A military spokesman said a convoy from the 82nd Airborne Division ran into an “improvised explosive device near Ramadi,” 100 kilometres west of Baghdad.

“Three soldiers were wounded. They were medivaced to the 28th Combat Hospital in Baghdad where one soldier died,” the spokesman said.

In Tikrit, US soldiers gunned down an Iraqi man after soldiers said he opened fire on them from a car late Friday just outside a US military base.

The dead man lay on the street in a pool of blood, while his driver stood handcuffed with his head covered in a sack. They had been firing celebratory shots in the air for a wedding, the driver claimed, when the soldiers hit his friend in the head with four gunshots.—Agencies