6 Iraqis Hurt in Attack on Police

Guerrillas fired on a police station Thursday in a town west of Baghdad, wounding six Iraqis, and a roadside bomb destroyed a U.S. armored vehicle in the capital. No Americans were hurt.

Two rockets struck the Ramadi Police Directorate, 60 miles west of Baghdad, as officers gathered inside to receive their monthly salaries, said Maj. Samir Habib. Two policemen and four civilians were wounded, he said.

Ramadi, on the main highway between Iraq and Jordan, is in the so-called Sunni Triangle, a region north and west of Baghdad that has seen fierce resistance to the U.S.-led occupation.

In south-central Baghdad, insurgents detonated a roadside bomb near a U.S. military vehicle, witnesses said. Smoke billowed from the tracked, armored vehicle while helicopters clattered overhead and soldiers cordoned off the area.

Meanwhile, American forces kept up their daily raids against suspected rebel strongholds, according to U.S. military reports.

Soldiers from the Army’s 1st Infantry Division killed one Iraqi and arrested nine after the troops were ambushed in the town of Khaldiyah, about 40 miles west of Baghdad.

Nineteen other suspected rebels were captured by the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in a raid in Husaybah, a restive town near the Syrian border. And the 82nd Airborne Division detained 19 suspects in the western town of Nassir Wa Al Salaam, the military said.

As military activity continued, the bodies of two Japanese diplomats killed in Iraq arrived in Tokyo, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi reportedly approved a plan to send about 1,000 noncombat troops to help rebuild the country.

“Japan must do what it can do, and overcome these deaths,” Koizumi said.

“We must not give in to terrorism. Japan should do what it can for the reconstruction of Iraq in cooperation with the international community.”

Elsewhere, a London-based Arabic newspaper printed a book excerpt from a former Iraqi official that said ousted President Saddam Hussein might have stashed away tens of billions of dollars in foreign banks, money he skimmed from Iraq’s oil revenue.

Jewad Hashem, who was Iraq’s planning minister in the late 1960s and early 1970s and lives in Canada, said that 5% of oil revenue was ordered deposited abroad in accounts under Hussein’s supervision when Iraq nationalized its oil industry in 1972.

Hashem’s assertion is in his autobiography, which is being excerpted in the Al Sharq al Awsat pan-Arab daily. The report could not be independently confirmed.