U.S. Soldier Slain in Baghdad Grenade Attack

An assailant dropped a grenade from a Baghdad highway overpass onto an Army vehicle Monday, killing one U.S. soldier and wounding three others.

In another part of Baghdad, relatives of people killed in an unsuccessful raid by U.S. soldiers looking for Saddam Hussein mourned their loved ones.

The death of the soldier from the 1st Armored Division brought to 50 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in hostile attacks since President Bush declared an end to major combat May 1.

The tactic of dropping explosives from a highway overpass onto convoys of military vehicles is frequently used, said Army Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons, a spokesman.

“It’s actually a pretty good tactic because it’s hard to respond to,” Fitzgibbons said. “It gives the attackers a chance to escape, especially if they drop it on the last vehicle.”

Fitzgibbons said that in some cases, the U.S. military has spotted a group of people on an overpass and has been able to prevent an attack. In Monday’s attack, two of the wounded suffered only minor injuries and were back on duty late in the day. The third was still being treated.

A second U.S. soldier was killed Monday in a road accident near the southern city of Nasiriyah.

In the eyes of many Iraqis, the U.S. soldiers, who are facing a constant threat of attacks, are increasingly inclined to shoot first and ask questions later.

In the wealthy Mansour neighborhood west of the Tigris River, where Sunday’s unsuccessful raid in pursuit of Hussein occurred, neighbors gathered on street corners to discuss it. Iraqis said at least four civilians were killed and five injured, three of them seriously, when U.S. soldiers fired at their cars.

In one car, a Catholic family was on its way to church. Another carried members of a Kurdish family dropping off a letter to be hand-carried by a friend to a relative in Europe. The identities of the occupants of a third car were not known, witnesses in the neighborhood said.

Mazan Albert, 35, his brother Alyas Thamir Albert, 40, and their mother, Clementine, were on their way to church when the shooting occurred. Mazan was killed; his mother and brother were wounded and taken to a military hospital.

Clementine’s sister, who came to the family’s house Monday, said that although the extended family lived in different neighborhoods, members usually went to Sunday services together. It was only after church services that she realized something had happened. She declined to give her name.

She thought it unlikely that Mazan Albert, who was driving, would have run a checkpoint -- the explanation from the U.S. military for the shooting.

“I don’t imagine he would refuse to stop,” she said. “He was a quiet, simple man.”

As a child, she said, he had been hit by a car and had lost the lower part of his right leg. His car was specially outfitted for someone missing a limb.

Alyas Thamir Albert, his older brother, has worked as a translator for the Americans mostly in Taji, north of Baghdad. His work badge, which family members showed to a reporter, has a picture of a serious-looking young man with short brown hair.

Clementine’s sister said no one in the family had been told where her injured sister and nephew had been taken.

Rabin Hazim, a neighbor who came to comfort the family, said the Americans hadn’t blocked the road until after the shooting.

No one had claimed Mazan Albert’s body by Monday afternoon. With multiple gunshot wounds -- one to the head and two in the shoulder -- he lay in a bloodied white shirt and worn blue pants on the floor of Yarmouk Hospital’s makeshift morgue.

Next to him were two other victims of the shooting, who also had suffered multiple gunshot wounds.

A fourth victim, a boy of about 15, had been brought in with a gunshot wound to the head. He was referred to a neurosurgery center, but Dr. Jamil Ibrahim, a general surgeon at Yarmouk, said the boy could not have survived.

A Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the Iraqis were in two cars that failed to stop at U.S. military checkpoints. Troops fired on both cars, he said.

“Of course that’s a very dangerous thing to do, when you fail to stop at a checkpoint,” the official said. “And to that extent, they represented a threat to our troops, who acted in accordance with their inherent right to self-defense.”

No one was killed in the car carrying members of Mohammed Abdulrahman’s family, who are Kurdish Shiite Muslims. They said they had supported the U.S. presence in Iraq -- until Sunday.

“At the beginning, I was so happy the Americans came,” said Nadhim Nariman, a cousin, who was standing next to Abdulrahman’s hospital bed, where he lay unconscious after abdominal surgery.

“Now I feel their presence is dangerous for us. Yesterday we prepared our weapons and we wanted to retaliate against the Americans, but our oldest cousin said no. But our cousin had this accident for nothing. Don’t the Americans know that we, the Shiite Kurds, were the biggest enemies of Saddam, the most dangerous to him?”

Abdulrahman’s 23-year-old son, Firaz, who was in the car when the shooting occurred, said his father was just turning down a side street when they were hit by gunfire. They had not realized they were driving into a forbidden zone.

“We didn’t even see the Americans when it first happened,” he said as he fanned his father to cool him in the sultry afternoon air.

Firaz, who returned to Baghdad from his army service in northern Iraq after the war, said that after having survived the war, he wondered whether he would survive the peace.

“They are thinking Saddam is here, but they are shooting innocent people. Maybe they are afraid and so they are shooting madly in this way,” he said.

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Times staff writer Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.