The terror group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda in Iraq, claimed responsibility on Wednesday for a suicide attack on an American convoy in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday in which it says the US consul in Mosul was killed. However, there have been no reports of the death of a US consul, but on Monday a diplomatic security agent attached to the US State Department, Stephen Sullivan, died along with three private American security guards when a suicide bomber drove into their convoy.In a statement posted on the Internet al-Qaeda in Iraq said: "Brother Karim Ansari from the city of Tel Afar from the Al-Bara bin Malik Suicide Brigades carried out an attack on a convoy of American vehicles yesterday carrying the US consul in Mosul, who was killed along with four of his personal bodyguards when two of the cars carrying them were destroyed."
In the message the terror group points out that the action is another attack carried out in response to the US military offensive on the rebel stronghold of Tel Afar, which ended last week. One military spokesman recently said that since August 26 they had arrested 211 suspects and killed 141 fighters in Tel Afar. The Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) estimates that some 5,000 families were forced to flee Tel Afar in the subsequent escalation of violence between insurgents and Iraqi and coalition troops.
Stephen Sullivan was the third American diplomat killed since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Fellow diplomatic security agent Edward Seitz was killed in October last year in a mortar attack on a US base near Baghdad International Airport. A month later James Mollen, a special adviser to Iraq's Higher Education and Scientific Research Ministry, was shot dead near the heavily-protected Green Zone in the capital.