Attack on British security firm in Iraq kills 4

A suicide car bomber ploughed into a convoy carrying employees of a British company in northern Iraq on Monday, killing four of them and wounding five Iraqi civilians, Iraqi security officials said.

The suicide bomber targeted the last vehicle of the convoy in restive Mosul, a dangerous city where al-Qaeda remains active, and the force of the blast threw the armored vehicle 40 meters into a ravine, killing everyone inside, police said.

"I saw the other members of the convoy bring out four dead foreign civilians from the smashed car. One of them was beheaded," an Iraqi military officer, asking not to be named, said by telephone from the site of the attack in northern Mosul.

Iraqi officials said the firm was a British construction company but its name was not immediately known. The UK embassy in Baghdad said a British national was among the dead.

"One British national was killed today during an attack against a convoy in east Mosul," embassy spokeswoman Sophie Farrell told AFP, without identifying the victim.

Britain provided the second largest contingent of troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, with a deployment which peaked at 46,000.

It ended combat operations in Iraq in April 2009, when all but a handful of British soldiers started returning home. Some 100 military are still deployed in the southern port of Umm Qasr where they train the Iraqi navy.

Mosul is on the front line of a longstanding feud between Iraq's Arabs and minority Kurds over land, power and oil wealth.

The region is also a hub for Sunni Islamist insurgents, and the U.S. military, which will end combat operations on Aug. 31, sees Mosul as al-Qaeda's last urban stronghold in Iraq.

Iraq is on high alert for insurgent attacks after a March 7 national election produced no clear winner and left the country adrift in political uncertainty.

Overall violence has dropped sharply since the height of sectarian carnage in 2006-7. But bombings and killings continue daily.

I saw the other members of the convoy bring out four dead foreign civilians from the smashed car. One of them was beheaded

An Iraqi military officer