BAGHDAD, Jan. 8 -- A U.S. warplane mistakenly dropped a 500-pound bomb Saturday on a house in a village near the northern city of Mosul, killing several Iraqis, according to witnesses and the U.S. military.
South of Baghdad, meanwhile, insurgents abducted and killed a Sunni Muslim official as he returned from a trip to try to persuade a Shiite Muslim leader to support a delay in Iraq's scheduled Jan. 30 elections.
Villagers in Aaytha, near Mosul, gather around the remains of a house the U.S. military said it mistakenly bombed.
(AP)
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The airstrike, by an F-16 fighter jet early Saturday on the village of Aaytha, 30 miles south of Mosul, was part of "a cordon and search operation to capture an anti-Iraqi force cell leader," the military said in a statement. The satellite-guided bomb struck a house that "was not the intended target. . . . The intended target was another location nearby."
The statement said five people were killed and that the military "deeply regretted the loss of possibly innocent lives." The owner of the house told news services that the bomb killed 14 people, including seven children.
The conflicting death tolls could not be independently reconciled, and the military said an investigation of the incident was underway.
Later Saturday, on the highway between Baghdad and the holy city of Najaf to the south, the body of Ali Ghalib, the head of the provincial council for Salahuddin province, was found riddled with bullets.
Ghalib was abducted on the road Friday afternoon while returning to Tikrit from Najaf, where he had sought to persuade Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to support a six-month delay in the nationwide ballot, according to Shuaib Dujaili, a Tikriti official who had been traveling on the same road.
The fates of three Iraqis accompanying Ghalib -- the deputy dean of Tikrit University's law school, another official and their driver -- could not be determined.
"I was driving on the same road last night, and I saw the gunmen stop them and put weapons in their faces," said Dujaili, an employee of the Tikrit health directorate. "I was about to go and tell the armed men that these are good people in order to save them, but my friend sitting next to me said: 'Don't be a fool. Do you want them to kill us?' "
The attack was a grim reminder of differences among the various Sunni groups that oppose holding the ballot on schedule.
Ghalib traveled to Najaf on behalf of Sunni political leaders who argue that violence in their areas -- much of it carried out by Sunni insurgents intent on thwarting an election that will likely hand power to the country's Shiite majority -- will prevent many Sunnis from voting. A U.S. general this week acknowledged that four largely Sunni provinces currently lack the stability to carry out balloting.
The tally by Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz did not include Babil province, south of Baghdad. That province's northern reaches have been dubbed the "triangle of death" by Iraqi travelers because of the frequent attacks on the road through it. Insurgents active in the area include Sunni extremists who insist that democracy is an affront to God's pre-eminence.
Relatives of Ghalib said insurgent contacts relayed word to them that he was kidnapped by one such group, al Qaeda in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian and the most-wanted insurgent leader operating in the country. The contacts said Ghalib was being interrogated and faced execution if he was found to be cooperating with Sistani toward making elections successful.
His body was found in Latifiyah on Saturday.
