Troops raid Baghdad mosque

Hundreds of Iraqi troops backed by US forces stormed a Sunni mosque in Baghdad after Friday prayers, killing four people and wounding at least nine, witnesses and an influential group of Sunni clerics said.

The Iraqi troops raided the Abu Hanifa mosque in the Sunni district of Aadhamiya, firing percussion grenades and damaging the doors, the Muslim Clerics Association said.

They opened fire when furious worshippers tried to beat back troops by throwing shoes at them.

Around 17 people were detained but the objective of the raid was not immediately clear.

The raid followed more than 100 arrests in a Sunni area of Baghdad the day before, when police said they detained some militants suspected of escaping the Sunni bastion of Fallujah during the bloody rout of insurgents by US troops.

Iraq's interim government has underlined its intention of crushing revolt among the once dominant Sunni minority to prevent it derailing plans for an election in January.

US-led forces have stormed at least two mosques in recent weeks and detained clerics critical of the Fallujah operation.

But guerrillas kept pressure on Iraq's US-backed security forces with a suicide car bombing on a police convoy in the capital.

A policeman and a bystander were killed and at least five people wounded, police said.

And in the troubled northern city of Mosul, an unexplained fire destroyed voter registration papers and other materials being stored at a warehouse in anticipation of the vote.

A car bomb in the city wounded a US soldier. Also in the north, another Iraqi policeman was killed in a mortar attack on a police station at Muqdidiya.

Special police commandos and US soldiers detained three people at a Mosul hospital they said had been used to treat rebels wounded in recent fighting, when insurgents put most of the city's new police force to flight.

Hundreds of Iraqi commandos meanwhile stor-med into the historic heart of Mosul yesterday.

Piled into dozens of white pickups trucks, the 400 heavily armed soldiers were tasked with raiding a suspected rebel meeting place deep inside the old quarter's maze of alleyways, amid expectations of a major US-backed assault on insurgent strongholds in the city. Last week, Sunni rebels went on the offensive in the city, overrunning several police stations and ransacking others.

US commanders said up to 100 insurgents were thought to be in the old quarter, among them rebel leaders, and that the aim of the operation was to draw them out into the open.

"We are finding the (insurgent) pockets with Iraqis, and going and asking them to come out and fight," said Colonel Robert Brown, the US military commander in Mosul. "Every time they fight, we will kill a lot of them."

US troops in the city said yesterday they had found headless and dismembered bodies near one wrecked police station. The discovery came as the Al Qaida allied group led by Jordanian Abu Musab Al Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the public beheading in Mosul on Thursday of two national guard officers.