Baghdad: A British military helicopter crashed in Basra on Saturday, and Iraqis hurled stones at British troops and set fire to three armored vehicles that rushed to the scene. Clashes broke out between British troops and Shiite militias, police and witnesses said.
Police Captain Mushtaq Khazim said the helicopter was apparently shot down in a residential district of the city. He said the four-member crew was killed, but British officials would say only that there were ''casualties.''
British forces backed by armored vehicles rushed to the area but were met by a hail of stones from the crowd of at least 250 people, who jumped for joy and raised their fists as a plume of thick smoke rose into the air from the crash site.
The crowd also set three British armored vehicles on fire, apparently with petrol bombs and a rocket-propelled grenade, but the British soldiers inside escaped unhurt, witnesses said. British fired weapons into the air in an effort to disperse the crowd, Khazim said.
Shooting broke out between the British and armed militiamen, and at least four people, including a child, were killed, the police officer said. Two of the victims were adults shot by British forces while driving a car in the area, he said.
Crowds chanted ''we are all soldiers of al-Sayed,'' a reference to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, an ardent foe of the presence of foreign troops in Iraq.
Later the crowd began to scatter as they heard an explosion. Groups of men set fire to tires in the streets and the situation remained tense.
The chaotic scene was widely shown on Iraqi state television and on the al-Jazeera satellite station.
The attack came at a difficult time for the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain, where many people oppose the US-led Iraq war.
After a poor showing by his Labour Party in local elections this week, Blair overhauled his Cabinet, ousting Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's following rumors that he and Blair had differed on issues including Iraq. Straw reportedly had expressed doubts about the Iraq war to his boss.
In violence elsewhere, a suicide bomber wearing an Iraqi army uniform entered an Iraqi base in Tikrit and detonated an explosives belt, killing an Iraqi lieutenant colonel, a major and a lieutenant, and wounding a lieutenant colonel, said Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Aziz Mohammed Jassim.
The US command also announced that an American soldier was killed by the roadside bomb in Baghdad on Friday. At least 2,417 members of the US military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003.
Britain has about 8,000 troops based in the mostly Shiite Basra area, and southern Iraq has long been much less violent than Baghdad and western Iraq where Sunni Arab-led insurgents and al-Qaeda in Iraq launch many attacks against Iraqi civilians and US and Iraqi forces.
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