At least 5 Iraqi civilians are killed by U.S. troops

A child was among at least five Iraqis killed when U.S. soldiers opened fire in two incidents in central Iraq during a span of 24 hours, while police said a suicide bomber posing as a shepherd killed up to 13 people Tuesday outside a police station in the eastern province of Diyala.

The shootings involved vehicles that the soldiers perceived as threatening.

Three women and a man were killed while riding a minibus to work in the northeastern Baghdad neighborhood of Shaab, an Interior Ministry official said.

Abu Ahmed, a 45-year-old bank employee injured in the shooting, said he and his colleagues were riding the minibus from their homes to work in the morning when the incident occurred. Abu Ahmed said he woke up in the hospital, not knowing what had happened. He had been knocked unconscious but not shot.

A U.S. military spokesman said soldiers opened fire when the vehicle turned onto a road that had been closed to all traffic but family cars after tips of threats the Americans had received. The soldiers opened fire when “the driver failed to heed a warning shot.”

The military said initial reports indicated that two Iraqis were killed and four wounded in the incident. The discrepancy between the death tolls cited by U.S. and Iraqi officials could not be immediately resolved.

Separately, U.S. soldiers shot at a car speeding through a roadblock north of Baghdad on Monday during an offensive against the militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq, the military said in a statement. One child and two men were killed in the incident near Baiji, 125 miles from the capital, the statement said.

“The ground force fired warning shots, but the driver attempted to speed through the roadblock. Perceiving hostile intent, the ground force engaged, killing both men,” the statement said.

The child was found wounded in the back seat and rushed to a military medical station, where he died, it added.

“We regret that civilians are hurt or killed while coalition forces work diligently to rid this country of the terrorist networks that threaten the security of Iraq and our forces,” said U.S. Navy Cmdr. Ed Buclatin.

In a further incident, Iraq’s Interior Ministry reported that U.S. soldiers opened fire Tuesday evening near the Ibn Hayan bridge in Tobji in northwest Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding six others. However, the U.S. military had no immediate confirmation of the incident.

The spate of shootings came after the U.S. and Iraqi governments signed a declaration of principles Monday committing them to reaching an agreement by the end of next year on America’s long-term security role in Iraq, including the status of U.S. forces. Iraqis regularly complain of cases in which U.S. troops have accidentally killed civilians during their operations. However, the U.S. military says it has reduced the number of incidents in recent months as violence has dropped in Baghdad.

In Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, a suicide bomber dressed as a shepherd detonated his explosives while herding sheep past the police headquarters’ back entrance.

Local police said the blast killed 13 people and wounded another 13. The Interior Ministry in Baghdad later lowered the death toll to seven, including four policemen, but it was unclear which toll was correct.

“He came closer and closer to the gate with his sheep,” said Baqubah police Capt. Ali Jassem. “Then he detonated himself by the visitors and the police.”

Also in Baqubah, a female suicide bomber wounded seven U.S. soldiers and five Iraqis, the U.S. military said in a statement.

Meanwhile, two U.S. soldiers were killed and two others wounded in the northern province of Salahuddin when an explosion ripped through a vehicle, the military said in a statement. At least 3,878 U.S. troops have been killed in the Iraq theater since the American-led invasion in March 2003, according to the website icasualties.org, which tracks casualties in the conflict.

Outside Baqubah, a Shiite Muslim tribal sheik was killed when Sunni Arab militants suspected of belonging to Al Qaeda in Iraq attacked the village of Albu Aziz, police said.

Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, was controlled by Al Qaeda in Iraq until June, when U.S. and Iraqi security forces reclaimed the city.

In Washington, a senior Iraqi Shiite leader allied with both the U.S. and Iran, Abdelaziz Hakim, met with President Bush in the Oval Office on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said. Their discussions centered on improvements in Iraq’s security and other changes in the country since the pair last met in December.

Hakim planned to travel to Houston for a medical examination to confirm that he has recovered from lung cancer diagnosed this year, a spokesman for Hakim said.

Separately, Shiite and Sunni Muslim clerics held a conference in the southern Shiite shrine city of Najaf to promote national unity and bridge the sectarian divide. The delegation met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, who urged the rival sects to find unity after the violence that rocked the country last year, conference attendees said.

In Damascus, the Syrian capital, more than a dozen government-sponsored buses left for Baghdad to take home Iraqis who fled their country in the last year because of sectarian violence. The United Nations estimates that as many as 1.5 million Iraqi refugees live in Syria.

ned.parker@latimes.com

Times staff writers Wail Alhafith, Raheem Salman and Usama Redha contributed to this report.