The U.S. military alleged the mayor refused to follow security procedures while entering the city’s municipal building

Additional Reporting By Subhy Haddad, IOL Correspondent

Baghdad, November 11 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - The U.S. troops admitted Tuesday, November 11 that they shot dead a local Baghdad official in the flashpoint Shiite Sadr City two days earlier, as four Iraqis lost their lives in a bomb attack in Basra and the son of an Iraqi oil official was killed in an assassination attempt on his father in the war-ravaged country.

U.S.-picked Mayor of the western Baghdad Al-Sadr (formerly Saddam) City, Mohannad Ghazi Al-Ka'aby, was shot dead by a U.S. soldier when he allegedly refused to follow security procedures while entering the city’s municipal building, the U.S. military said in a statement.

"During the altercation, a shot was fired, wounding Mohannad in the lower extremities," read the statement carried by Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The shooting of the mayor in an area that houses as many as two million Shiites and has been a source of troubles for the Americans was sure to inflame the critics of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Thousands local inhabitants on Monday took to the streets of the city, some 15 kilometers to the west of Baghdad, shouting anti-U.S. slogans in a demonstration against the killing of their mayor.

Although the inhabitants of Al-Sadr city, named after Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer Al-Sadr who was reportedly assassinated by the former regime in late 1990s, have been jubilant over the end of the Saddam era, they are equally furious over the military provocations of the U.S. military, including random shootings and wide-scale detentions.

Unconfirmed reports put the number of Iraqis detained by the U.S. forces at hundreds of thousands distributed in dozens of old and new prisons and detention centers all over the country.

Some Governing Council members, particularly those representing Muslim Sunni and Shiite parties, have complained that dozens of their members and supporters were detained by the U.S. troops over the past few weeks.

Basra Bomb Kill 4 Iraqis, Wounds 9

Meanwhile, four Iraqis died, two of them policemen, and nine people were hurt, when a bomb exploded in the center of Basra on Tuesday, police Colonel Mohammed Khazim al-Ali told AFP.

A second blast echoed over downtown Basra about midday (0900 GMT), but it was not immediately known if there were further casualties.

"Some of the injured are school children. Boys and girls use this road early in the morning to go to school," said Ali, the head of internal security forces in Iraq's southern capital.

He blamed loyalists of ousted president Saddam Hussein for the first blast, a roadside bomb which blew up a civilian car at about 08:30 am (0530 GMT), and damaged two more cars.

British forces had cordoned off the area of the first blast, which included at least one school.

A spokeswoman for the British army, which controls the Basra area, said there were casualties in the morning blast but did not know how many or the gravity.

Separately, the director-general of Iraq's Northern Oil Enterprise on Monday escaped an assassination attempt when he was attacked by unknown gunmen. However, his son who was accompanying him in his car was killed in the atack in the city of Mosul, 420 kilometers to the north of Baghdad.

The oil official was seriously injured.

Iraqi Intelligence Body

In another development, Al-Shira'a newspaper reported Tuesday that the Governing Council has passed a decision by its higher security committee to form a new Iraqi intelligence body, whose basic mission will be chasing out "terrorist" elements who penetrated into Iraq recently and remnants of the former regime.

It said that the new intelligence body would comprise a majority of the former dissolved Iraqi Intelligence Body and would be presided over by Ibrahim Al-Janaby, a leading member of the Iraqi National Reconciliation Movement now represented in the Governing Council.

"Janaby had been the liaison officer between the National Reconciliation Movement, chaired by Council Member Ayad Allawi and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who had penetrated into the former Iraqi Intelligence Body in the late 2002," Al-Shira'a said.

This comes as an American soldier and a Kurdish fighter working with the Iraqi border guard died in separate attacks on Monday.

The attacks on the U.S. forces are blamed on the remnants of the Saddam regime, but frustrations over the continued occupation of the oil-rich country and lack of security leave anti-American sentiments among ordinary people on the rise.