http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=450122Troops kill rioters in Baghdad and Basra
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
05 October 2003
British and American troops fired into crowds of rioting former Iraqi soldiers in Basra and Baghdad yesterday, killing one man in each city.
In both places unrest broke out as the ex-soldiers, out of a job since the Iraqi army was dissolved in May, were queuing for hours to collect a promised pay-off of $40 each. A British military spokesman, Major Simon Routledge, said that in the Basra incident a British soldier heard gunfire and then shot and killed an Iraqi holding a weapon. Troops also fired rubber bullets to disperse the crowd.
In Baghdad hundreds of Iraqis threw stones and charged towards American soldiers, who fired in the air and beat them back with batons. "Get out of here. It is very dangerous," said a harassed Iraqi police officer as he stood beside the burned-out remains of a police car.
In the nearby Yarmuk hospital Hussein Hatem, an ex-soldier, was lying on a bed with an X-ray clutched to his chest showing that he had two bullets lodged in his thigh. "It started when one man went to get a drink of water after we had been queuing for five hours," said Mr Hatem. "The US soldiers wouldn't let him get back in the line and beat him and us with long batons and electric cattle prods. Then we started throwing stones at them and they fired back."
The riot shows how friction between Iraqis and occupation troops can easily explode into violence, even when the authorities hand out money with the aim of defusing tensions. A few hours earlier, an attack on American troops with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns left one US soldier dead and another wounded.
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