British soldiers patrol a road in the southern Iraqi city of Basra (AFP)

BASRA, TIKRIT, January 4 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – While U.S. soldiers shot dead Saturday, January 3, four Iraqi civilians, including a woman and a nine-year old child, British soldiers kicked and tortured one Iraqi prisoner to death.

The British mass-circulation Independent said Sunday, January 4, that eight young Iraqis arrested in the southern Iraqi town of Basra last year were assaulted by British soldiers, and one of them died of his injuries.

The daily's veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk said that Baha Mousa's body was returned to his family covered in bruises and with his nose broken, after he and seven other men were arrested by British occupation forces in September 2003.

Fisk said that military and medical records of the case showed that the father Mousa sustained his injuries in a severe beating.

British military authorities offered Mousa's family $8,000 in compensation, providing they were not held responsible for his death, but his relatives planned to take Britain's Ministry of Defense to court, the newspaper said.

Reuters news agency said a Ministry of Defense spokeswoman declined to give details about the case.

"There is an ongoing military police investigation into a death that we had in custody," she told Reuters.

The incident came to surface as British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Basra on Sunday to pay a snap visit to British troops in southern Iraq.

Coming off a family holiday in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Blair was expected to spend the day with some of the 10,000 British troops who occupy the oil-rich south.

Four Iraqi Civilians Killed

U.S. soldiers in Tikrit fire a mortar (AFP)

Meanwhile, U.S. troops shot dead four Iraqi civilians, including a woman and a nine-year old child, Saturday, January 3, while the U.S. military took more three deaths in two separate attacks.

The Iraqis were killed when their car tried to pass a U.S. convoy and the soldiers opened fire on it in the area around former captured Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. 

"The car, a grey Chevrolet Caprice, was hit by 27 shots and skidded, resulting in the death of four people, including a woman and a nine year-old child," Tikrit police chief Colonel Ussama Adham Abdel Ghaffer told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell, head of the 4th Infantry Division 1-22 battalion that patrols Tikrit, said he knew of a shooting incident with a civilian car, but emphasized that his men were not involved.

He said he was unsure of the details but had received unconfirmed reports that three or four people had been killed near Tikrit.

But a fifth occupant of the car, who survived with chest injuries, contested the U.S. version, asserting the vehicle had come under fire from a U.S. convoy.

More U.S. Deaths

Separately, the U.S. military announced Saturday night that three of its soldiers were killed Friday, January 2, in two separate attacks.

A U.S. soldier was killed in an attack at Balad, 75 kilometers (45 miles) north of Baghdad, shortly after Iraqi resistance fighters in the volatile nearby western town of Fallujah shot down a U.S. helicopter killing one soldier.

Sergeant Robert Cargie, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division, said the Balad attack occurred at about 5:00 pm (1400 GMT) and that the soldier was struck by shrapnel from a mortar exploding inside a military base.

Two U.S. soldiers were also killed and three wounded Friday when a roadside bomb exploded by their vehicle on Baghdad's Rashid street.

The deaths bring to 215 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in resistance attacks since U.S. President George W. Bush declared an end to war in Iraq on May 1.