US helicopter kills Iraqi civilians

Two boys aged eight and 11 are among the victims of the air strike in Baiji.

iraq
The bodies of shepherds killed in the strike [Reuters]
A doctor who asked not to be named said Baiji hospital received eight bodies after the incident, including a 60-year-old man.
 
Reuters photographs showed relatives of the dead standing beside their corpses covered by white sheets outside a mosque in Baiji, 180km north of Baghdad.
 
Lieutenant-Colonel Maura Gillen, a US military spokeswoman, said the military was following up the incident, in which “suspicious activity” had been noted and warnings to stop the car were ignored.
 
The incident comes at a sensitive time.
 
Journalists killed

 

Two Iraqi journalists were killed in separate incidents in Baghdad and the province of Diyala on Wednesday, police and their employers said on Thursday.

 

Wissa Ali Ouda, a cameraman for private television station Afaq, was killed by a sniper as he was heading home in the al-Obeidi district of northeastern Baghdad, Khazaal Ghazi, his editor-in-chief, said.

 

Tariq Maher, a correspondent for Afaq said the 30-year-old cameraman was apparently caught in the crossfire in eastern Baghdad as he was on his way home.

  

The body of another journalist, Haidar Hashem al-Husseini, was found in the town of Baquba northeast of Baghdad on Wednesday, two days after he was kidnapped, a local police official said.

 

At least 127 journalists and 50 media workers have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. That figure does not include Ouda and al-Husseini’s deaths.

Source: News Agencies