Helicopter downing kills six Americans

Insurgents claim survivor's shooting death

Baghdad, Iraq ? Insurgents brought down a helicopter carrying 11 civilians with missile fire north of Baghdad Thursday and said they captured and shot to death the lone crew member who survived. The dead from the crash included six American bodyguards for U.S. diplomats.

The chartered flight was believed to be the first civilian aircraft shot down in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion two years ago.

An Internet statement by a group identifying itself as the Islamic Army in Iraq was accompanied by a video showing the repeated shooting of a man who was found in tall grass and forced to stand up and walk. The video showed burning wreckage just before the shooting.

“One of the crew members was captured and killed,” the statement said.

The man who was shot to death in a grassy field spoke English with an accent and was wearing a blue flight suit, indicating he was one of the three Bulgarian crew members. Two Fijian helicopter security guards were also on board the flight.

The video also showed two charred bodies near the burning wreckage, about 12 miles north of Baghdad.

The authenticity of the video, posted on a Web forum often used by militant groups, could not be confirmed. A U.S. Embassy official in Baghdad said he had no knowledge that anyone on board survived the crash and was killed later.

The Russian-made Mi-8 helicopter was shot out of the air as growing numbers of contractors, diplomats and other civilian officials are turning to aircraft to avoid insurgent attacks on Iraq’s roads.

The six Americans on board the downed helicopter were employed by Blackwater Security Consulting — a subsidiary of North Carolina-based security contractor Blackwater USA, which had four employees slain and mutilated by insurgents in Fallujah a year ago.

As of Thursday, at least 1,563 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. At least 1,189 died as a result of hostile action, according to the Defense Department.Since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, 1,425 U.S. military members have died, according to AP’s count. That includes at least 1,076 deaths resulting from hostile action.

The Americans were assisting the Bureau of Diplomatic Security in protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq.

“They played a critical role in our effort to bring a better way of life to the people of a country who have not experienced freedom and opportunity for many years,” State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said.

The Islamic Army statement said it killed the survivor “in revenge for the Muslims who have been killed in cold blood in the mosques of tireless Fallujah before the eyes of the world and on television screens, without anyone condemning them.” It apparently was referring to the Nov. 13 shooting by an American soldier of a wounded Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque during a U.S. offensive in the city.

Thursday’s helicopter crash was thought to be the first shootdown of a civilian aircraft in Iraq since the invasion in March 2003.

Elsewhere in Iraq, two U.S. Marines were killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb in Ramadi, west of the capital, the military said. The attack was followed by more explosions and gunfire Thursday in Ramadi and Baghdad that killed at least five people, including two foreign civilians.