At least three Western security contractors were killed when their convoy was hit by a roadside bomb in the Iraqi city of Basra today, according to local reports.

Television pictures showed a silver four-wheel-drive vehicle overturned by the side of the road with at least two bodies nearby, wearing flak jackets. Witnesses said that four Westerners may been killed in the attack.

An initial police report said that the convoy belonged to the British consulate in Basra but this morning the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence denied that any British diplomats or soldiers had been injured in the attack.

A police statement said that the bomb had hit a vehicle carrying "security contractors, killing three of them and wounding one." Colonel Talib said the nationality of the victims was not yet known.

The attack comes two days after a bomb killed two British soldiers on a road just to the west of Basra, which is centre of the British military presence in Iraq. The area has been generally peaceful under the British occupation but conditions have deteriorated in recent weeks.

Elsewhere in Iraq a legal adviser to Saddam Hussein denied reports that the fallen dictator had confessed to war crimes.

Late last night, the President of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, said that an investigating judge had been "able to extract confessions from Saddam’s mouth" about a series of massacres and war crimes committed by his regime.

Mr Talabani, a Kurd who has spent much of his life campaigning against Saddam, said the former tyrant had admitted to ordering a series of crimes, including the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds which occurred in the late 1980s and cost the lives of more than 100,000 people.

"I met the investigator who questioned Saddam," said Mr Talabani said in an interview on state television. "He said he had extracted important confessions from Saddam Hussein and he signed them... There are 100 reasons to sentence Saddam to death."

But today, Abdel Haq Alani, a legal adviser to the Hussein family, accused the President of trying to prejudice the trial of Saddam, which is due to start on October 19. So far, Saddam has been charged with one crime, the slaughter of hundreds of Shia Muslims in Dujail, a town north of Baghdad.

Mr Alani told the Associated Press that Saddam's alleged confession "comes to me as a surprise, a big surprise". Referring to Mr Talabani, he said: "This is a matter for the judiciary to decide on, not for politicians and Jalal should know better than that."

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