FIVE members of the same Iraqi family, three of them children under the age of 4, were shot dead yesterday when US troops opened fire on their minivan outside a military base, fearing a suicide car bomb attack.

The family were returning from a funeral in Balad to nearby Baquba, north of Baghdad, when they came across a patrol of US military vehicles forming a roadblock near the base.

“The soldiers started shooting at us from all over,” Ahmed Kamel al-Sawamara, 22, the driver, said at the hospital where the dead and three wounded were taken. “I slowed down and pulled off the road, but they continued firing. I saw my family killed, one after the other, and then the car caught fire. I dragged their bodies out.”

The dead were two men and three children aged 1, 2 and 3, according to Mr al-Sawamarra, Iraqi police and hospital workers. Two women and a child were wounded. An American spokesman confirmed the shooting but put the toll at three dead and two wounded.

An official said that soldiers had fired warning shots because the van was being driven erratically, then opened up on the vehicle after it failed to stop. “This is a tragedy,” Major Steve Warren, a spokesman for US forces in Baquba, said, “but these tragedies only happen because Zarqawi and his thugs are out there driving around with car bombs.”

There were angry scenes at the hospital as the survivors, all relatives of the dead, accompanied their bodies to the mortuary. Television footage showed two dead children inside the mortuary and relatives kissing another body on a trolley.

“They are all children; they are not terrorists,” a relative shouted. “Look at the children,” he said as a hospital worker carried a dead toddler into a refrigeration room. “We felt bullets hitting the car from behind and from in front,” said another survivor with blood running from a head wound. “Heads were blown off. One child had his hand shot off.”

American troops are often accused by Iraqis of shooting at civilian vehicles at roadblocks and from convoys travelling among ordinary traffic; but checkpoints and convoys are frequently attacked by car bombers driving civilian vehicles. No such bombing has yet been carried out by a vehicle with multiple occupants.

The Americans have never published figures for how many civilians they have killed by mistake in such incidents.

Separately, Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi President, arrived in Iran, the first Iraqi head of state to visit its non-Arab, Shia neighbour since the late 1960s. The delegation, made up of senior security officials, is expected to take a tough line with Iranian officials, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline President, over allegations of Iranian interference and sponsorship of terrorists inside Iraq.

Officials said that one of the issues raised would be the supply of sophisticated weapons to militias.

Iran’s influence in Iraq is one of the most volatile issues fuelling tensions between Sunni Arabs once dominant under Saddam Hussein and the longoppressed Shia majority empowered after elections.

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