A US fighter jet attacking an Iraqi bridge about 100 miles from the border with Syria accidentally bombed a bus, killing five Syrian civilians, the Pentagon admitted yesterday.

Another ten Syrian workers were injured when a US missile struck the bus as it crossed the bridge in Rutba, western Iraq, as it was returning to Syria early on Sunday morning.

According to the Syrian news agency SANA, the bus was carrying 37 Syrians fleeing the “American-British aggression” when it was struck.

A US military spokesman, in a statement at the coalition’s forward command headquarters in Qatar, said: “Unfortunately yesterday coalition forces destroyed a civilian bus during targeting of a bridge on the Iraqi side of the Syrian border.”

Major General Stanley McChrystal, vice-director for operations for the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said later: “A coalition aircraft was dropping ordnance on a bridge a hundred miles from the Syrian border. After the bombs were released a bus came into the pilot’s view but too late to recall the weapons. The bombs struck the bridge and the bus.

“Unintended casualties like this are regrettable. We extend our sympathies to the families of those civilians who were accidentally killed.”

The Syrian Foreign Ministry in Damascus summoned the US and British Ambassadors yesterday to lodge an official protest over the incident. An official Syrian statement called the bombing a criminal act.

Syrian television interviewed survivors, who said that the missile hit the bus while some passengers were disembarking.

The incident will do little to calm the nerves of moderate Arab governments in the region and is sure to inflame Arab public opinion. Mass demonstrations were held at the weekend against the war in several countries, including Egypt and Jordan, American allies in the region.

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