"We had a Kurdish speaker out there"

U.S. forces killed eight Kurdish soldiers and wounded nine others at an established checkpoint in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Friday, Kurdish officials said.

A U.S. military statement offered a differing account of the incident, saying that U.S. troops killed five Kurdish police officers after the men ignored orders to lay down their weapons and exhibited "hostile intention."

"What the American statement said is not true," said Kabir Goran, deputy director of the Mosul office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a Kurdish political party. "They are trying to cover the massacre that they carried out at that military point," he said in a telephone interview.

"It is impossible that we attack the Americans," he said. "Their patrols are passing by that point every day, and we never attack them."

The U.S. statement said the American soldiers were in the al-Karama neighborhood of Mosul early Friday preparing for a raid against members of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq.

U.S. soldiers saw a group of armed men in a "bunker" near the building where the soldiers suspected insurgents were housed and instructed them to put down their weapons, the statement said.

"They were called out in Arabic and in Kurdish," said Lt. Col. Christopher C. Garver, a U.S. military spokesman. "We had a Kurdish speaker out there."

A U.S. helicopter swooped in to take a closer look, and soldiers on board "observed hostile action from the bunker and exercised proper self-defense measures in response to the assessed threat," the statement said. Link

db:"We had a Kurdish speaker out there"
...... did you kill him and if not why not?