Judge Renews Warrant For British Soldiers

The two British soldiers were arrested by Iraqi authorities on Monday after allegedly shooting two Iraqi policemen who tried to detain them. One of the policemen reportedly was killed. The two British soldiers, operating undercover, were subsequently taken into custody. A British armored patrol then surrounded the jail where the two were held, setting off a riot in Basra, Iraq's second largest city and the southern hub of the country's oil industry. Angry residents attacked the British armor with firebombs and pelted soldiers with stones as they jumped from the burning vehicles. Later Monday, British armored vehicles crashed through the prison walls in an operation to rescue the two soldiers. They were subsequently found in a nearby house in the custody of militiamen, Britain said. Basra authorities said the operation violated Iraqi sovereignty, and the governor ordered all government employees to stop cooperating with the British, who have 8,500 troops in the Shiite Muslim-dominated region. Judge Raghib al-Mudhafar, chief of the Basra Anti-Terrorism Court, said Saturday that he reissued homicide arrest warrants for the two soldiers on Thursday. But the British government said its troops are not legally bound by the warrants. "There is no legal basis for the issue of this arrest warrant. Rather, we have a legal obligation to investigate the allegations ourselves. That is being done as we speak," a spokesman at the British defense ministry said in London on Saturday. "We will continue to work with the Iraqis on the inquiry which the Iraqi government has begun" into the clash, he said in an interview. He spoke on condition of anonymity, as spokesmen at British ministries often do, in keeping with a government regulation. In Basra early Saturday morning, several rockets were fired at the British and American consulates in the city, but both fell in a nearby field, hurting no one, said police Capt. Mushtaq Khazim. Also, three rockets were fired at the Shat al-Arab hotel, the headquarters of the British army in Basra, he said. One rocket hit the building, without causing casualties. The two others hit nearby private homes, wounding an Iraqi civilian, Khazim said. He said it was not clear who had fired the rockets. Elsewhere in Iraq, a suicide car bomber driving at high speed exploded his vehicle near an Iraqi army checkpoint in downtown Baghdad, killing three soldiers and an Iraqi civilian, police said. Late Friday, a roadside bomb killed a U.S. soldier whose convoy was patrolling in southeastern Baghdad, the military said Saturday. The attack raised to at least 1,913 the number of U.S. military members who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003. http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/93-09242005-545861.html?referrer=email [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on September 25, 2005]

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