DOHA, May 28: Violent demonstrations broke out Wednesday in Hit, a town 130 kilometres west of Baghdad, when residents protested searches of their homes by US troops, Al-Jazeera television reported.

Al-Jazeera’s correspondent was interrupted several times during his live transmission by what sounded like a crowd chanting anti-US slogans.

Quoting witnesses, the correspondent of the Qatar-based Arab satellite station said US troops, aided by Iraqi policemen, had been searching houses in Hit for weapons, provoking the anger of residents.

FIGHTING AT FALLUJAH: Saddam Hussein has claimed to be “fighting the Americans” and appealed for resistance against the US and British forces that ousted him last month, according to a letter attributed to him, received by the middle-east-online.com websit, a report filed from Dubai said.

The same website on Tuesday posted a statement in which the so-called “General Command of the Iraqi Armed, Resistance and Liberation Forces” claimed responsibility for an ambush which was confirmed to have killed two US soldiers and wounded nine others in the Iraqi city of Fallujah earlier in the day.

The statement said the attack was carried out by “special forces, al-Faruk Brigades, and members of the Baath Party” that ruled Iraq until its ouster by the US-led coalition on April 9.

The authenticity of the letter and statement, which the website said it had received by fax and copies of which were made available to AFP, could not be confirmed.

The US Central Command said two of the assailants were also killed when US troops returned fire from an unknown number of guerrillas who attacked with rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) and small arms in Fallujah, a stronghold of Saddam supporters 50 kilometres west of Baghdad.

Witnesses told AFP that RPG fire also brought down a US helicopter, while Centcom said the chopper was struck by an armoured vehicle as it was trying to get into firing position.

The claim of responsibility posted on the website spoke of “downing a US aircraft and killing its four crew.”

In the letter attributed to Saddam and dubbed his “fourth handwritten letter” since he was ousted, the former Iraqi strongman called for more attacks against Americans. The London-based Arabic daily al-Quds al-Arabi has published three letters attributed to Saddam Hussein, whose whereabouts are unknown, since his overthrow.

PALESTINIAN DIPLOMAT: US troops detained a Palestinian diplomat in Baghdad on Wednesday in a move sure to anger Arab opinion, and a new council in the volatile northern oil city of Kirkuk elected a Kurdish mayor.

Soldiers handcuffed charge d’affaires Najah Abdul Rahman and four other men outside what ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s government recognised as the Palestine embassy.

The troops said the men had illegal weapons, but it was not clear what had prompted them to disarm a Palestinian diplomat in a city awash with arms seven weeks after Saddam’s overthrow.

As a military truck took him away, Abdul Rahman denied he had been carrying a gun. “They searched the embassy...They are targeting the embassy,” he told reporters. A Palestinian source in Baghdad said later that nine other Palestinians, including the three guards at the mission, had also been detained. He said the US troops put barbed wire around the building and locked the main gate.

Meanwhile, another focus of tension emerged when the country’s largest Shia Muslim group blasted the US-led administration’s decision to dissolve its military wing.

Last week, Iraq’s US administrator, Paul Bremer, ordered a ban all heavy weapons in Iraq and required authorization to carry small arms. The decree effectively dissolved all militias, except those of the Kurdish factions in northern Iraq, which were exempted as members of the US-led war coalition.

Meanwhile, the US-led coalition said it would pay a reward for any information that helped to locate mobile laboratories that could be used to make banned chemical and biological weapons. US President George W. Bush had pinned his case for war on charges that Saddam had amassed an arsenal of such weapons, but coalition forces have yet to unearth clear evidence of this.

In northern Iraq, the election of a Kurdish mayor for Kirkuk, which many Iraqi Kurds regard as their capital, drew concern from local Arab and Turkmen leaders worried about Kurdish domination of the city’s interim administration.

US forces hailed the vote as a step towards democracy and the new mayor, Abdurahman Mustafa, appealed for unity among the city’s uneasy mix of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and Assyrians.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair set off on Wednesday for Kuwait on a tour also due to include a brief trip to Iraq, the first visit to the country by a Western leader since the war.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said 64 cases of cholera had been confirmed in Basra and surrounding areas, compared to 39 in all of 2002.

The actual number of cases this year was likely to be far higher as the surveillance system which monitored the spread of the disease collapsed during the war and the weeks of chaos and looting that followed, WHO officials said.—AFP/Reuters