Iraq Accuses U.S. of ‘State Terrorism’ : Protest: Letter calls on Security Council to condemn bombing. It also claims that an American U-2 spy plane flew over Baghdad days before attack.

Iraq has lodged a formal protest with the Security Council over the U.S. cruise missile attack on Baghdad, accusing the United States of “state terrorism and blackmail.”

“This was a deliberate terrorist act perpetrated by the government of the United States of America on grounds which were spurious and unjustified,” said the letter, made public Monday, from Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf to the Security Council.

The letter was received by the council on Sunday, when the United States briefed members on evidence it says proves that Iraq masterminded a plot to assassinate former President George Bush during his visit to Kuwait in April. Iraq denies the charges.

The United States says it bombed Iraq’s intelligence headquarters in Baghdad early Sunday in retaliation for Iraq’s state-sponsored terrorism.

The council took no action Sunday, but most members supported the U.S. action. It appeared Monday that council members didn’t want to intervene.

Sahaf protested the missile strike, directed against what he described as the headquarters of “the Iraqi information service and the nearby civilian districts of Al Mansour and Al Mamoun in the very center of Baghdad.”

Sahaf said “this totally unjustified act of aggression” killed and wounded a large number of Iraqi civilians.

In the letter, Sahaf called on the Security Council to condemn the U.S. bombing and to halt “the repeated barbaric attacks against Iraq and other countries and peoples of the world, as evidenced by current events in Somalia.”

The letter said U.N. silence about “crimes” committed by the United States against Iraq “has encouraged the belligerent U.S. regime to persist in this course of action and seek to secure world hegemony by means of armed force, state terrorism and blackmail.”

Iraq also charged in the letter that a few days before the United States launched the attack on Baghdad, an American U-2 spy plane flew over the city, purportedly on a mission for U.N. arms inspectors.

“This constitutes irrefutable evidence that the American U-2 spy plane was used for espionage operations in preparation for the American attack on Iraq,” Sahaf told the Security Council.

He was referring to a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, based in Saudi Arabia, that regularly flies over Iraq in support of operations by the U.N. Special Commission in charge of finding and scrapping Baghdad’s weapons of mass destruction.

The commission was set up by the Security Council shortly after the end of the 1991 Gulf War, in which a U.S.-led coalition expelled invading Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

Iraq has repeatedly objected to the U-2 flights, saying they serve U.S. intelligence purposes rather than the United Nations’.