Criminal Probe Opened in Deaths of 2 Officers

BAGHDAD —  U.S. authorities have launched a criminal investigation in the deaths of two Army officers who were initially reported killed by a mortar strike at a base near the town of Tikrit, the military said Friday.

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division is examining the deaths Wednesday of Capt. Phillip T. Esposito and 1st Lt. Louis E. Allen after explosive-ordnance experts determined that their deaths were “inconsistent with a mortar attack,” according to a military statement.

Authorities in Iraq and at the Pentagon offered no further details, and it was unclear who might have been involved.

The two men were killed on a sprawling base along the Tigris River that houses a lavish former palace of Saddam Hussein that has been converted to a military headquarters. They were with the 42nd Infantry Division of the New York Army National Guard. Esposito was the commander of the division’s Headquarters & Headquarters Co., and Allen was a company operations officer.

The initial investigation “indicated that a mortar round struck the window on the side of the building where Esposito and Allen were located,” according to a statement. The Chicago Tribune reported that they were in a room on the ground floor.

Other soldiers at the base heard a series of explosions about 10 p.m. Tuesday, said Col. Bill J. Buckner, a military spokesman in Baghdad. The two officers died of their injuries the next day.

It was unclear from the preliminary information what caused the explosions.

“We’re not ruling anything out,” Buckner said early today.

Among the scenarios being considered are that the explosions were caused by an accident, by insurgents who infiltrated the base or by fellow U.S. personnel, Buckner said.

“Right now, the investigation is in its infancy stage,” he said.

Rockets and mortar rounds hit U.S. bases in Iraq almost daily. However, direct hits are unusual.

The families of the two soldiers were immediately notified when it became clear that the initial report that the two had been killed by “indirect fire,” either a mortar shell or rocket strike, proved incorrect, Buckner said.

Allen, 34, of Milford, Pa., was deployed in April and arrived in Tikrit a few days ago, according to the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y. He was a science teacher in New York state and is survived by his wife and four children, ages 6, 5, 3 and 1.

Esposito, 30, a 1997 graduate of West Point, had worked for the Smith Barney unit of Citicorp Inc. in New York City and was sent to Iraq in January, according to the Journal News of White Plains, N.Y. He is survived by his wife and 18-month-old daughter.

A formal announcement of a criminal investigation after the death of a U.S. soldier here is extremely unusual.

Military investigators have tracked down suspects in the deaths of troops, but those cases typically involve bomb makers or other insurgent operatives and are not identified as criminal inquiries.

Word of the inquiry came on a day when officials confirmed that five Marines had been killed by a roadside bomb Thursday in western Iraq and that the bodies of 21 Iraqis, apparent victims of execution, had been found at three sites in western Al Anbar province.

An Interior Ministry official said a car bomb late Friday near a clinic in the largely Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Shula in northern Baghdad left 10 dead and 27 injured.

The five Marines were killed when their vehicle hit an “explosive device” near Haqlaniya, a Euphrates River valley town on the road to the Syrian border, the military said. Other details were not available.

Al Anbar province, a vast desert region west of Baghdad that stretches to the borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, encompasses much of Iraq’s Sunni Arab heartland. Sympathy with the guerrillas runs high there, and the central government imposes little direct control.

The Marine deaths bring to at least 1,689 the number of American troops who have died since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to a count by Associated Press.

U.S. military deaths here average two a day or more, and Iraqi security personnel have suffered an even heavier toll. The Bush administration’s eventual exit strategy from Iraq is based on much of the security responsibility being turned over to Iraqi troops.

On Friday, an Iraqi soldier reached by telephone at a base in western Iraq confirmed that the bodies of 21 Iraqi soldiers had been discovered in Al Anbar province. The soldiers were attached to a base in Qaim, near the border with Syria, he said.

Qaim is an insurgent hotbed where U.S. Marines carried out a major operation last month, resulting in the deaths of scores of suspected militants and at least nine Marines.

The 21 Iraqi soldiers were dispatched on a mission four days ago and disappeared near the town of Rawa, said Hamad Hassan, a soldier also based at the Qaim facility. The men were apparently intercepted on the hazardous roads of western Iraq.

Twelve of the bodies were found Thursday west of Qaim, Hassan said, and the others at two other locations.

Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group led by Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi, claimed in an Internet posting that it had abducted 36 Iraqi soldiers Wednesday in western Iraq, according to news agencies. The claim could not be verified.

Times staff writers Ashraf Khalil in Baghdad, Monte Morin in Los Angeles and Maggie Farley in New York contributed to this report.