BAGHDAD, June 30: At least 30 Iraqis were killed and scores injured on Saturday when an ammunition dump they were looting blew up, local residents said on Monday.

They said US forces arrested several looters after the blast at the ammunition dump in a desert area north of the town of Haditha, 260km northeast of Baghdad, and handed them to Iraqi police in the town.

There was no comment from the US military.

The residents said looters had been at the abandoned Iraqi army depot to seize casings of artillery shells that they could sell. It was not known what caused the blast.

“These people...don’t know anything about weapons. Their only concern is making illegitimate earnings,” Ibrahim Hussein, a Haditha resident, told Reuters in Baghdad by telephone.

Looting has been rampant in Iraq since the fall of President Saddam Hussein in April.

HUNT FOR SADDAM LOYALISTS: US forces in Iraq continued a major sweep north of Baghdad on Monday, vowing to crush the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s ousted Baath Party regime they blame for a string of attacks on occupation forces.

“The goal is to catch former regime loyalists, former Republican Guards and paramilitary troops,” Lt-Col Bill McDonald told AFP in Tikrit, around 175km north of the capital.

The area of operations is “mostly in the region from Tikrit to the north of Baghdad. It’s mostly up and down the river Tigris in Saddam’s backyard,” he said, describing the campaign as an ongoing operation with no fixed timeline.

The US military said in a statement that the operation, dubbed Desert Sidewinder, had already netted more than 60 people suspected of being Fedayeen militia fighters or members of the ousted Baath Party.

A party colonel was among those arrested, according to a later statement.

Occupation forces have described the Sunni Muslim belt, where support for the toppled regime was once strongest, as the nexus of activity for paramilitaries and diehard Baathist loyalists.

A US army spokesman was unable to say how many people were still being held.—Agencies