IRAQ: Guerrillas killed five US soldiers and two Iraqi guards in a mortar attack on National Guard headquarters in Samarra, north of Baghdad, yesterday.
The attack came as a Lebanese-born US marine missing from his unit in Iraq, who was at one point reported to have been beheaded by his captors, was handed over to US officials in Beirut.
The latest violence erupted a day after Iraq's interim government announced a new security law giving itself tougher powers to combat the insurgency wracking the country.
Eighteen US soldiers and four Iraqi guards were also wounded when guerrillas fired mortar rounds at the National Guard headquarters, severely damaging the building, the US military said. The building is also used by US troops.
A US Army Apache attack helicopter fired Hellfire missiles at a nearby building after the strike, killing four insurgents, the US military said. American forces used radar to locate the source of the mortar fire and responded with 120mm mortar rounds.
The deaths in Samarra, a mainly Sunni Muslim town some 100km north of Baghdad, brought to 651 the US combat death toll in Iraq since the invasion in March last year.
The National Guard, renamed by the interim government, is a 40,000-strong paramilitary force set up during the US-led occupation, when it was known as the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps.
Outside Samarra, insurgents opened fire on a convoy of oil tanker trucks, killing two drivers, at least one of whom was Turkish, witnesses said.
Uncertainty over the fate of Marine Cpl Wassef Ali Hassoun, who went missing in Iraq on June 21st, appeared to be resolved when US officials said he was at the American embassy in Beirut.
"He is safe. He appears to be healthy. We're working through the details of what the next steps are," said a US official at the Pentagon. The State Department spokesman, Mr Richard Boucher, said Cpl Hassoun had been at the embassy since about 3 p.m. GMT.
"We were able to go get him this morning . . . He made contact with us," he said.
At one point he was believed to have been decapitated by his captors.
Later a statement from an Islamist group said he had been moved to safety after pledging to leave the military.
Lebanese security and hospital officials said later that two people had been killed in a gun battle between members of the clan of Cpl Hassoun and people who taunted them as being American collaborators.
The shooting took place in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli but not in the district where the family of Cpl Hassoun lives.
The casualties were not members of the Hassoun clan, which numbers more than 1,000 people, officials said.
Kidnappers continued to keep up the pressure on the government of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Mr Iyad Allawi, threatening to kill a Filipino hostage unless Manila withdrew its troops from Iraq.
In Manila, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ordered no more workers to go to Iraq after Al-Jazeera television showed footage on Wednesday of a Filipino in the hands of gunmen who set a 72-hour deadline for their demands to be met.
In Baghdad, police said an official of the ousted Baath party was killed when a bomb hidden in his car exploded outside a rope factory he owned. Baathists have frequently been murdered in revenge attacks.
In the northern city of Mosul, one policeman was killed and seven wounded when a roadside bomb exploded at a roundabout.
Another was shot dead when insurgents fired at a police station, the US military said. Four suspected insurgents were detained.