Infant among 6 slain in Iraq

BAGHDAD â€”  A teenage girl and an infant were among six people killed Tuesday during a gun battle and U.S. tank barrage against suspected insurgents in western Iraq, American military officials said.

The bodies were discovered in a house in Ramadi from which the suspected insurgents had fired on U.S. troops, who were trying to clear an improvised bomb, the military said. The city is in Al Anbar province, which is dominated by Sunni Arabs.

“As the insurgents continued to engage the patrol, coalition forces returned fire with main gun tank rounds,� a military statement said. “Coalition forces conducted an extensive search of the house and found one male and five females, ages ranging from infant to teenaged, dead.�

A woman who survived refused to accept medical treatment from U.S. troops, the statement said. The suspected insurgents escaped, the military said.

The military also said a Marine assigned to the Army’s 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, was killed by hostile fire in Al Anbar province on Monday.

Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the spokesman for U.S.-led forces in Iraq, said military forensics experts continued to investigate Monday’s crash of a U.S. Air Force F-16CG fighter jet 20 miles northwest of Baghdad.

The pilot’s body has not been recovered, military officials said. Insurgents were observed in the area after the crash, the officials said. Investigators are conducting DNA tests from samples collected at the site.

In the west Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliya, six mortar rounds injured 23 people, including women and children. They were taken to Yarmouk Hospital, where several hours later two car bombs exploded, killing 14 people and damaging the hospital’s morgue.

Also in the capital, Iraqi army special forces captured two suspected members of a bomb-making cell, the U.S. military said. Seven other people were detained.

U.S. and Iraqi forces raided a Shiite Muslim mosque Monday night and wounded four militiamen in a gunfight.

The troops arrested 14 men at the mosque and confiscated improvised bombs, mortar rockets, machine guns, flak jackets and Iraqi police and army uniforms, the military said.

Police patrols brought 35 bodies to the Baghdad city morgue; all were middle-age men stripped of their identification and shot to death.

In the southern Shiite city of Hillah, more than 3,000 people marched in support of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr and his Al Mahdi militia.

Meanwhile, an American forensics expert testified at Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial about evidence gleaned from mass graves filled with the deposed leader’s alleged victims.

Clyde Snow showed the Iraqi tribunal slides of bullet-shattered skeletal remains exhumed from the graves.

Hussein, who is appealing his recent conviction in the 1982 slaying of 148 Shiite Muslims from the village of Dujayl, is being tried for his role in a 1987-88 military campaign that killed tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians.

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Times special correspondents in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Hillah and wire services contributed to this report.