By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer SAMARRA, Iraq - A funeral for two Iraqis killed in a firefight with U.S. troops turned violent Saturday, with mourners killing a security officer and chanting pro-Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) slogans over his body.
Further north, gunmen killed a policeman, as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld assessed security in the region.
The funeral in Samarra started after American forces returned the bodies of
the Iraqis killed here last week to their families. The town is in the so-called
Sunni Triangle, the central region north and west of Baghdad where opposition to
the U.S. occupation has been fiercest.
After a somber procession through the town, mourners began firing weapons in
the air � as is customary � and members of the U.S.-led Iraqi Civil Defense
Corps ordered them to stop, witnesses said. The mourners fired at the
paramilitary forces, shooting a civil guard in the head, and set their truck on
fire.
As the rest of the civil defense corps fled, dozens of people jumped up and
down on the burning pickup and near the body, chanting, "Long live Saddam! Death
to the traitors!"
Other mourners buried the two bodies, marking their graves with Iraqi flags
and a scattering of red and yellow roses.
"God is great! Nobody escapes our revenge," mourners chanted at the cemetery.
There were no American forces in sight.
The U.S. military initially claimed to have killed 54 resistance fighters in
running battles last Saturday in Samarra. Iraqi police and hospital officials
dismissed those claims, saying eight bodies were recovered after the clash and
that most of the dead were civilians.
Farther north in the city of Mosul, three gunmen shot and killed an Iraqi
policeman on his way to work Saturday, police said. The victim was a 24-year-old
recent graduate of a police academy that has received support and guidance from
coalition forces.
Guerrillas recently have increased attacks on Iraqi police and other
authorities, accusing them of collaborating with the U.S.-led occupation.
Violence also has intensified in Iraq (news
- web
sites)'s north, and Rumsfeld spent several hours in Mosul during a daylong
trip to Iraq. The defense secretary also met with the governor of Kirkuk, a town
nearby, to discuss the security situation, said Ismail Hadithi, the deputy
governor.
In the northern province of Nineva, whose capital is Mosul, U.S. troops
captured 16 people, 10 of them allegedly planning attacks against coalition
forces, the U.S. military said. The others included a weapons dealer and
black-market merchants, said Master Sgt. Kelly Tyler.
She said armed men in a car opened fire late Friday on a base of the 2nd
Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division in central Mosul. There were no injuries,
and the attackers fled.
L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. official in Iraq, predicted Friday that
guerrillas would step up attacks in the next few months in an effort to thwart a
transfer of sovereignty from the occupation authority to a new Iraqi government.
"In the immediate phase ahead of us, between now and the end of June, we will
actually see an increase in attacks, because the people who are against us now
realize that there's huge momentum behind both the economic and political
reconstruction of this country," Bremer said in an interview with Associated
Press Television News.
The coalition and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council agreed Nov. 15
to hold caucuses across Iraq to select delegates who will elect a transitional
government with full sovereign powers, formally ending the U.S.-led occupation.
American troops will remain in Iraq.
U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said that in the week ending Friday, there were
an average of 19 attacks a day on coalition forces, and an average of two a day
against Iraqi security forces or civilians. The
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