A US soldier was jailed for three years for shooting dead an unarmed and wounded civilian in Baghdad's Sadr City, as Iraqi security forces were again targeted in attacks that killed 11 across the country.
Amid the violence, one US soldier was killed in Al-Anbar province, where renewed fighting erupted in the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah after days of relative calm following last month's blistering assault on the city, the US military said.
Sentenced to three years in prison, Staff Sergeant Johnny Horne was also demoted to the rank of private, ordered to forfeit all pay and handed a dishonourable discharge at a court martial in the Iraqi capital, the army said.
Horne was convicted Friday of the unpremeditated murder in August of a severely wounded and unarmed Iraqi. He told the court that he shot the man to "put him out of his misery."
Kassim Hassan was murdered after US soldiers spotted a garbage truck allegedly dropping homemade bombs in Sadr City, the capital's most populous Shiite Muslim neighbourhood, the court heard.
Horne's unit started shooting at the truck, which caught fire, before a severely wounded Hassan pulled himself out of the vehicle and fell to the ground.
"When I found him, I came to the conclusion that he needed to be put out of his misery," Horne said. "I fired a shot into his head and his attempts to breathe ceased."
He was also found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder with two other soldiers, who have yet to stand trial.
An investigation is ongoing into a November incident in which a US marine allegedly shot dead a suspected insurgent who was wounded and unarmed in Fallujah.
Military commanders claim their assault on the Sunni Muslim city crippled Iraq's insurgency, but eight coalition soldiers were wounded Saturday when their convoy was attacked with mortar rounds, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire in the northern city of Mosul, the US army said.
Air support dropped a 500-pound bomb on the attackers, but the number of casualties among the attackers was unknown, it added.
Fighting also broke out in Fallujah, with the US marines firing several dozen artillery rounds from their main base outside the city during the day, an AFP correspondent said.
The US military later announced that one soldier was killed in Al-Anbar, without specifying if the death occurred in Fallujah.
Elsewhere, at least 10 other people were killed Saturday in a continuing wave of attacks that often target Iraqi security forces.
Three police officers, including a provincial police chief, were killed and six others wounded in two separate ambushes north of Baghdad, police said.
Masked gunmen also killed seven civilians in a series of attacks Friday and Saturday in Iraq's "triangle of death", south of Baghdad, police and witnesses said.
After spending a month deployed in that region, one of the most violent in Iraq, some 200 soldiers from Britain's Black Watch regiment returned to England Saturday.
Faced with ongoing violence, the US army has pressed its sole supplier of armoured Humvees to increase production amid a growing domestic controversy over armour for troops.
In Washington, Army Secretary Francis Harvey called Armor Holdings Inc. Friday to ask that deliveries be increased from 450 to 550 armoured Humvees a month after the company said it could boost production by 22 percent, said a senior army spokesman.
With January's landmark elections looming, the electoral commission said Saturday that Iraqis living in Canada and Germany may not be able to vote in the poll because the two countries are worried that voting centres might be attacked.
In Iraq's first free elections in half a century, citizens are to elect a 275-member national assembly on January 30.
The country's leading Sunni political organization, the Iraqi Islamic Party, unveiled its electoral list Saturday, along with several other parties, including communists, Christians and Kurds.
Meanwhile, Iraqi oil minister Thamer Abbas Ghadbane warned that rebels hoping to disrupt the elections were sabotaging oil wells in a bid to create a fuel shortage and drive up fuel prices.
"These acts are intended to cause a shortage and feed anti-government anger, increasing the pressure on the administration to abandon the elections," he said.
Fuel shortages already force Iraqis to queue for hours at service stations or buy their petrol on the black market, where costs have soared to more than 20 times the normal price.
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