Insurgents rigged a girls’ school under construction near Baghdad with explosives, building artillery shells into the walls and ceilings, in a plan that would have killed scores of children, a US general said yesterday.

“We found artillery shells that were being literally built into the ceiling,” said Major General William Caldwell, the senior US military spokesman in Iraq. “We found artillery shells, again all hooked up with wires, being built into the floors. We found propane tanks – two very large propane tanks – built into the floors under the stairwells.”

The school was identified as the Huda Girls’ School in Tarmiya, in a predominantly Shia area north of Baghdad. The plot was discovered only when US soldiers spotted a detonation wire across the street from the building and followed it to the school.

“It was truly just an incredibly ugly, dirty kind of vicious killing that would have gone on here by al-Qaeda,” General Caldwell said. “Somebody had clearly taken and planned to take this school, a place of learning for these young children and turn it into a death trap.”

Al-Qaeda has not balked at wantonly killing children before, even using two small boys as camouflage to smuggle a car bomb past an American checkpoint in a Shia area of Baghdad and then blowing them up with the device.

Dozens of children have been killed when car bombs targeting US convoys exploded as they gathered around, begging for sweets. Sunni guerrillas also use boys as young as 12 to fire rocket grenades at US troops in Fallujah and to plant roadside bombs.

As the American surge increases there are fears that al-Qaeda will resort to evermore ruthless or callous attacks as security forces limit their room for manoeuvre. General Caldwell said that the latest plot was “obviously a sophisticated premeditated attempt to inflict just massive casualties on our most innocent victims – young children, girls in this case”.

Militants have long employed the technique of building improvised explosive devices into paving stones to ambush security patrols, but the Tarmiya plan appeared to be one of the most ambitious and ruthless uses of the technique so far. The construction company building the school is under investigation.

The US military also announced the names of two more al-Qaeda operatives killed this week in operations that also claimed the life of the terror network’s “information minister”. The two men – reportedly part of a group of five al-Qaeda members killed in Baghdad – were named as Sabah Hilal al-Shihawi, the spiritual guide of the killed propaganda chief Muhared Abdul Latif al-Jebouri, and Abu Ammar al-Masri, whose name suggests that he was of Egyptian origin.

US troops also detained 16 people in Baghdad’s main Shia militia area of Sadr City who were accused of smuggling armour-piercing explosives that had been made in Iran.

An American soldier was also killed, by a roadside bomb, south of the capital yesterday, and five Iraqi policemen died while on patrol in the violent Sunni area of western Baghdad.

— Shias in Basra and Najaf have staged angry protests against the television channel Al-Jazeera. The demonstrators claimed that one of the station’s presenters had insulted the revered Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, by questioning his leadership credentials.

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