3 Iraqis, GI killed in Iraq
AFP, Basra
Two Iraqi women employed by a unit of US oilfield services company Halliburton were shot dead late Wednesday in this southern port city, while an Iraqi and a US soldier died in separate bomb blasts. The violence directed against collaborators with the US-led coalition continued in Basra late Wednesday when four assailants gunned down two women on their way home from work amid a wave of targeted killings. "The assailants stopped their car and shot them dead," said coalition spokesman Dominic d'Angelo yesterday of the women, employed as laundresses by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR). The women's driver told AFP on condition of anonymity that four men stopped the car and warned him not to intervene. "They pulled the first women out of the car and immediately shot her, and did the same with the second, shooting her in the head," he said. The women's families said they believed the killers belonged to radical Islamist groups. Coalition officials have warned that the threat of violence in Iraq now stems less from loyalists of Saddam Hussein than from Islamic extremists and foreign fighters. A US soldier was killed and two wounded in a bomb attack outside of Baquba, 50km north of Baghdad, a US military officer said Thursday.
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