IRAQ - July 19 - US & UK Air Attack Kills 5.

The official Iraqi News Agency (INA) quotes a military spokesman as saying: "At 11:15 pm local time yesterday [July 18] evil American and British warplanes violated our airspace coming from Saudi Arabia and carried out 34 sorties. The enemy attacked civilian installations in the province of Qadissiya (Diwaniya), killing five citizens and wounding 17 others". The military spokesman says a house was destroyed and another was damaged during the attack in the centre of Diwaniya city, some 180 km south of Baghdad. A statement on the website for US Central Command in Florida said: "Coalition aircraft used precision-guided weapons today to strike a military cable repeater station in southern Iraq in response to recent Iraqi hostile acts against coalition aircraft monitoring the Southern No-Fly Zone". The US Central Command said it never targets civilian populations or infrastructure. (Military activity in the region has become more frequent in recent months amidst speculation that the US might invade Iraq to oust Pres. Saddam Hussein. US and UK planes patrol two "no-fly" zones set up after the 1991 Gulf war in northern and southern Iraq. Baghdad does not recognise the zones which the US and UK say were imposed to protect a Kurdish enclave in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south from possible attacks by Iraqi government forces).