The Black Vault - Ambush Kills Three British Soldiers in Iraq

By Andrew Gray - BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Three British soldiers were killed and one was seriously wounded on Saturday when gunmen in a pickup truck opened fire on a military convoy in Iraq (news - web sites), the British military said.

The attack in the southern city of Basra was the most deadly on British soldiers since June, when six soldiers were killed in the town of Majjar.

In Baghdad, U.N. staff resumed work four days after a truck bombing devastated their compound, killing 24 people. They were operating from tents and shipping containers near the rubble of their old building.

The U.N. bombing sparked fears among many foreigners that they could be the next targets. Britain's Foreign Office said it had evacuated its Baghdad embassy the day after the attack after receiving a credible threat.

Tension was also high in northern Iraq, where U.S. forces shot dead two people on Friday after trying to break up clashes between Kurds and Turkmen, two ethnic groups that complain of decades of persecution under Saddam Hussein (news - web sites).

A British military statement said a convoy was traveling through Basra "on a routine movement when it was ambushed by gunmen from a pickup truck."

Basra resident Sabih Naameh said one of the two cars in the convoy had crashed after coming under attack.

"I saw the British vehicle come past me, and another one behind it was firing. They went up on to the pavement, and smashed into a wall," he said.

The convoy was made up of a military Landrover and a civilian four-wheel-drive vehicle. But all the occupants were uniformed troops and the attackers would have been in no doubt that they were attacking soldiers, a military spokesman said.

TEN BRITISH KILLED SINCE WAR

Ten British soldiers have now been killed in their mainly Shi'ite Muslim area of Iraq since major combat was declared over on May 1 in the U.S.-led war that ousted Saddam in April.

Over the same period, guerrilla attacks have killed 64 U.S. soldiers mostly in Sunni Muslim regions, which are bastions of support for Saddam, himself a Sunni.

In Baghdad, colleagues flown in from abroad joined Iraq-based staff to restart the U.N.'s work on Saturday.

"It's difficult because a lot of our records have been lost," said David McLachlan-Karr of the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Paul Bremer, Iraq's U.S. interim governor, said he believed the attack had been carried out by Saddam loyalists, "foreign terrorists" -- a likely reference to al Qaeda or other Islamic extremists -- or a combination of both.

"All three of these of hypotheses are still worth pursuing based on the facts as we know them," Bremer said, vowing violence would not derail efforts to transform Iraq.

"Those seeking the imposition of some fresh tyranny will fail," he told a news conference.

BRITISH EVACUATION

The head of the U.N. mission in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was among the dead in the attack on Tuesday.

The day after the blast, British embassy staff moved to the headquarters of Iraq's U.S.-led administration.

"I have no more information about the threat... There are no immediate plans to return the staff to the embassy," a Foreign Office spokesman in London said on Saturday.

In northern Iraq, U.S. troops killed two Iraqis and wounded two more on Friday near the city of Kirkuk, a U.S. military spokeswoman said on Saturday.

"They were fighting over a shrine that Turkmens rebuilt and had put up that had been banned under Saddam," said Major Josslyn Aberle of the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry division.

"It was destroyed...and when the patrol showed up, the groups were fighting over it. Some Turkmen turned fire on the patrol, so we shot back," she said.

Dozens of Turkmen, some waving the flag of an Iraqi Turkmen political party, marched through Baghdad on Friday, accusing Kurdish fighters of killing several Turkmen during confrontations over the shrine. (Additional reporting by Rosalind Russell and Joseph Logan in Baghdad and Andrew Cawthorne in Tikrit)

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