US troops killed six people and two children near Bayji, 200 kilometres north of Baghdad, during a raid while an Iraqi cameraman was shot dead by a US sniper, reports said Thursday, according to dpa. Commenting on a report that the Bayji victims were all civilians, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Iraq said "coalition forces regret the loss of innocent civilian lives." "Terrorists continue to show their disregard for human life by endangering children with their illegal and violent activities," US Navy Captain Gordon Delcambre said in an e-mailed statement. Captain Charles Calio, another spokesman, said in a telephone interview that an investigation had been opened into the shooting of the children late Wednesday. US military officials said the raid was part of several operations Wednesday targeting members of an al-Qaeda in Iraq bombing network in the area between Bayji and Tikrit. Calio said the operations had lasted longer than 24 hours and were continuing so the number of dead and arrested could well go up. Coalition forces arrested two people on a wanted list and another 28 who acted with "hostile intent" during the raid or had weapons caches, Calio said. A source in the Iraqi police force in Salahaddin province told Deutsche Press-Agentur dpa late Wednesday that a US helicopter fired the lethal shots during a raid. The source said those killed were civilians trying to escape. US military officials said coalition forces followed a vehicle that departed a building guarded by "terrorists with machine guns" and tried to stop the vehicle without using lethal force. They fired three warning shots, US military officials said. The suspects made "threatening" movements from inside the vehicle and refused to stop. US forces then fired on the vehicle, killing the six suspects and two children, the statement said. Witnesses told dpa the US troops stopped all white-coloured cars and checked the occupants' identification during the raid. They added that people stayed at home for fear of being shot or arrested. Separately, an Iraqi cameraman was allegedly killed by a US sniper in Baghdad's al-Obaidy area, but the US military said there was no confirmation of such a killing. Quoting a statement issued by the Press Rights group, the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency said Wissam Auda, a 32-year-old Iraqi cameraman for the al-Afaq satellite channel, was killed on Wednesday by a US sniper. However, the US military told dpa that there was no confirmation that any Iraqi civilians were killed. "Coalition forces only engage hostile threats and take every precaution to protect innocent civilians," an official with the US military forces told dpa. The death of the cameraman, who was born in 1975, brings the total number of journalists killed in Iraq to 258 since April 2003.
