March 31 2004 at 07:45PM

'Fallujah will be a cemetery for Americans'

By Karim Saheb

Fallujah - Furious Iraqis hacked up the charred remains of two civilians killed in an ambush on Wednesday, hung them from a bridge and vowed to make this rebellious town a cemetery for occupation soldiers.

The two victims were among four contractors killed in a brutal ambush in this hotbed town of anti-occupation activity west of Baghdad.

In Washington, the American state department said at least three of the victims were United States citizens.

'Down with the occupation'

"Three of the four are US civilians," an official said. "We're looking into who the fourth is. There's a possibility it's an American, but we haven't been able to verify that person's nationality yet."
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US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations chief, told a press conference in Baghdad that the four were killed when two vehicles, both four-wheel drives, were ambushed and set ablaze in Fallujah.

Boiling with anger, demonstrators hurled rocks at the bodies that dangled from a bridge straddling the Euphrates River as they shouted: "Down with the occupation, down with America," an AFP correspondent witnessed.

The bodies, one of them headless, were then pulled down and placed on the ground for people to kick and slash with knives.

Young men strung a severed hand and a leg on an electricity pole on the main street Fallujah, where the attack took place early on Wednesday.

'Down with America'

Four police officers in a car who were near the bridge at the time were seen leaving the scene without intervening.

The names of the victims and the organisation they worked for were not released. It was also not clear what they were doing in Fallujah.

The residents had dragged the two bodies from the scene of the ambush, carried out by assailants using small arms who left after the attack.

Witness Ali Mohammed, 31, said the convoy was made up of three cars.