Helicopter attack kills U.S. soldier

? Insurgents shot down a U.S. helicopter on Friday west of Baghdad, killing one soldier, and U.S. forces said they came under fire with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades as they guarded the burning aircraft.

The military said the attackers who fired at U.S. forces after the crash near Fallujah were posing as journalists. But there was confusion about the claim, because the Reuters news agency reported that U.S. troops fired at its journalists at the scene and later detained three.

Elsewhere, Arab gunmen shot and killed a Kurd amid rising ethnic tensions in the northern, oil-rich city of Kirkuk, and a Baath party official was assassinated in an apparent revenge killing in Mosul. An American tanker truck was set ablaze in western Iraq, and coalition forces raiding a Baghdad mosque arrested 32 suspected insurgents and seized an arms cache.

U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said enemy fire likely downed the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior that crashed near Fallujah, a flashpoint in the insurgency.

Troops of the 82nd Airborne Division “are fairly convinced that it was enemy fire,” said Kimmitt, who was in Baghdad.

Soon after, five men “wearing black press jackets with ‘press’ clearly written in English” fired on U.S. paratroopers guarding the crash site, Kimmitt said. He said it was the first time he had heard of assailants in Iraq posing as journalists.

Reuters said a team led by Iraqi cameraman Salem Uraiby was filming the crash scene from a checkpoint using a camera on a tripod and was wearing a flak jacket marked “press.”

“We were fired on and we drove away at high speed,” driver Alaa Noury said. He said a second car driven by another Iraqi journalist had been fired upon in the same incident. One of the cars remained in Fallujah, Reuters said.

Rebels have previously shot at and brought down U.S. helicopters elsewhere in the so-called “Sunni Triangle,” the heartland of Saddam Hussein’s support and a center of resistance to the U.S.-led occupation.