Ali Yussef Shahin, 42, a relative of the people killed in the house, said no insurgents were in the village of about 100 houses.
"I think they did make a mistake," said Shahin, who lives in Mosul. "They wanted to attack the house to provoke the people."
Residents said the village of Aaytha has been largely peaceful but harbors extremists who oppose U.S. forces in Iraq.
Jubori, the neighbor of the family that was killed, said U.S. soldiers raided the house before it was bombed but did not make any arrests. He said that about five minutes after the Americans left the village, he heard a huge explosion.
"All the local people left their houses and went running," he said. "Because I lived the closest, I was the first who reached the bombed house. It was totally destroyed. We hurried to save our distressed neighbors but we discovered no one survived. All of them were killed."
In a separate incident Sunday, the U.S. Army said two people were killed when soldiers fired on a vehicle that had approached a checkpoint in Duluiyah, near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. The vehicle swerved off the road and hit a telephone pole, the military said in a statement. The driver and a front-seat passenger were killed. A passenger in the back seat was treated for shock. The military said the incident was under investigation.
A civilian guard at Duluiyah Electrical Co., who said he witnessed the incident, disputed that account. He said a gunner manning a Humvee at the checkpoint appeared to fall asleep, setting off a spray of bullets that pierced the vehicle. "It looked like he fell down on his gun and fired," said the guard, Abu Sager.
"The American soldiers were apologizing to the people . . . and took the family to the hospital," he said.
At the Balad hospital, Wasam Talab, a physician, said he treated four members of the family. The driver and his sister died from gunshot wounds, he said, and the driver's wife and 2-year-old son were treated for minor cuts from glass.
In another incident Sunday, witnesses said a roadside bomb planted in a carton exploded near a group of Marines and U.S. soldiers on foot patrol in the village of Abu Ghraib. The Marines confirmed that an improvised explosive device detonated, injuring an unspecified number of Marines and soldiers. As a policy, the Marines do not discuss details of casualties.
Farhan Ali, 52, a shepherd from the village, said insurgents told him to clear out of an area on a busy dirt road from Abu Ghraib to Smailat because they had planted a bomb in a cardboard carton that was set to blow up next to the foot patrol. "All the people in the area knew about it," he said. "The insurgents asked us to stay out of the road."
Ali's account, if accurate, shows how entrenched insurgents have become in local communities, where they target U.S. forces in broad daylight.
"All of us were just watching," Ali said. "There were a bunch of kids standing away from the road expecting and watching to see an explosion."
A U.S. soldier assigned to Task Force Baghdad was killed in a roadside bomb explosion Sunday, the military said, without indicating where the attack occurred. In a separate incident, a Marine assigned to 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in action in Anbar province, the military said.
Seven Ukrainian troops and a Kazakh soldier also were killed Sunday when a bomb they had seized exploded accidentally.
On Monday, gunmen assassinated Baghdad's deputy police chief, Brig. Amer Nayef, and his son outside their home, the Reuters news agency reported.
And in Seoul, the Foreign Ministry said it was checking reports that one or two South Koreans may have been kidnapped in Iraq, the Associated Press reported. The kidnapping was reported on the Web site of a militant group that demanded the withdrawal of South Korea's 3,600 troops in Iraq. A South Korean, Kim Sun Il, was beheaded in June by insurgents who made similar demands.
Correspondent Karl Vick in Fallujah and special correspondents Dlovan Brwari in Mosul and Salih Saif Aldin in Tikrit contributed to this report.
