Attack on U.S. Base in Iraq Kills 1 Soldier, Injures 34

Anti-American insurgents fired six mortar rounds at a U.S. military camp west of Baghdad on Wednesday night, killing one soldier and wounding 34, a military spokesman said.

A Pentagon spokesman said the soldiers were attacked at Logistical Base Seitz outside the capital. Some returned to duty shortly after the attack, and others were hospitalized, spokesman Lt. Col. James Cassella said. He said he did not know the extent of their injuries.

Earlier Wednesday, U.S. troops said they destroyed a home in Fallouja, a center of anti-American insurgency west of Baghdad, after they were fired on.

Enraged neighbors said an innocent couple were killed in their home. “This is democracy? These corpses?” Raad Majeed asked at the hospital.

The neighbors said soldiers were on a routine search for suspects and arms when they came under fire. The soldiers then fired at the couple’s house. Neighbors identified the victims as Ahmed Hassan Faroud and his wife, Suham Omar.

In southern Iraq, a British soldier died in a training accident in Basra, bringing the death toll for British troops to 53, a British military spokesman said.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair was assailed Wednesday over a late submission by his government in the inquiry into the death of a British scientist.

Blair’s spokesman acknowledged that the government had sent information to senior Judge Lord Hutton after he concluded his investigation last fall, but denied it included new evidence.

Hutton said that there was nothing surprising about the submission and that the BBC and the scientist’s family had also made late submissions.

Weapons expert David Kelly killed himself in July after being exposed as the source behind a BBC reporter’s claim that Blair and his team exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq.

In Washington, meanwhile, a think tank said Wednesday that Bush administration officials “systematically” misrepresented the danger of Iraq’s weapons programs.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in a study that there was “no convincing evidence” that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program and that United Nations inspectors had discovered that nerve agents in Iraq’s chemical weapons program had lost most of their lethal capability as early as 1991.

Meanwhile, two Democratic senators asked the U.S.-led occupation authority to explain its intended purchase of up to 50,000 AK-47 assault rifles for Iraq security forces when, they said, the country is already filled with such weapons.

“We question whether this is an efficient use of U.S. taxpayer dollars in a country already awash with AK-47s, many of which have been confiscated by coalition forces and are sitting in stockpiles,” Sens. Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote.

Dutch troops based in the south of Iraq got a surprise visit Wednesday from Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, the government said. The 1,100 Dutch soldiers are based in British-controlled Muthanna province.