NAJAF, Jan 28: US and Iraqi forces killed 250 gunmen in a fierce battle involving US tanks and helicopters on the outskirts Najaf on Sunday, a senior Iraqi police officer said.

The US military said two Americans were killed when an attack helicopter went down during the day-long battle in what was one of the strangest incidents of the four-year conflict.

In other incidents of violence, at least 61 people were killed and scores wounded in different parts of Iraq on the eve of Ashura on Sunday. Police found 54 corpses of people killed in brutal sectarian attacks in violence-wracked Baghdad.

The day-long battle was continuing after nightfall, Colonel Ali Nomas told Reuters, as tens of thousands of pilgrims converged on the nearby city of Karbala for the climax of the Ashura commemorations.

A US helicopter was shot down in the fighting, Iraq security sources said. The US military declined comment. A Reuters reporter saw a helicopter come down trailing smoke.

Shia political sources said the gunmen appeared to be both Sunni Arabs and Shia loyal to a cleric called Ahmed Hassani.

The governor of Najaf province said Iraqi troops fought a day-long battle with up to 200 Sunni gunmen, including foreign fighters, holed up in orchards on the northern outskirts of the city, seat of Iraq's most powerful Shia clerics.

A Reuters reporter about 1.5km from the fighting said he heard intense gunfire and saw US helicopters rocket groves sheltering militants.

He saw smoke trailing from one helicopter before it

came down in the midst of the fighting.

He was unable to see what had happened to the helicopter, but officers in Iraq's 8th Army Division and policemen said it had crashed and that the two crew members were dead. The US military said it did not comment on operations still taking place.

Iraqi security officials also reported that insurgents fired mortars into a girl’s school in Baghdad that injured four pupils.

An AFP photographer at the Al-Khulad secondary school saw the body of what appeared to be a young girl in a light wooden casket, but was unable to confirm that she had died in the shelling.

In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, two car bombings killed 16 people and wounded 30, police chief Maj-Gen Torhan Yussef told AFP.

Mr Yussef said the first blast hit in front of a car showroom in the city's northern Almaz district, a normally peaceful area inhabited largely by Kurds and Christians.

The attack left eight people dead and 18 wounded, before a second car bomb killed another eight people and wounded 12, he added.

In another brutal bombing, eight more people were killed and 18 wounded as a car bomb ripped through the impoverished Shia bastion of Sadr City in Baghdad.

Casualties were also reported from south of Baghdad in the Babil province where several mortar rounds killed another 10 people, a police officer said.

In another Baghdad attack, an adviser to Industry Minister Fawzi Hariri was killed along with his daughter, driver and bodyguard in an ambush, a security source said.

Gunmen raked the convoy of Adel Abdel Mohsen with automatic weapons fire in Yarmuk, western Baghdad.

At least 18 more Iraqis died in other violence.—-Reuters/AFP