BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — American troops hunted for
anti-aircraft missiles along Iraq’s trucking routes, digging
through heaps of manure, mounds of hay or piles of pomegranates
yesterday. The U.S. Army retrieved the wreckage of a downed
transport helicopter and searched for clues about who knocked it
from the sky.

Attacks continued yesterday — a blast near a Shiite Muslim
shrine in the southern city of Karbala that witnesses said killed
at least one person, and a barrage of three mortar rounds in
Baghdad that caused no reported casualties.

One clue in Sunday’s helicopter shootdown may lie in
Ramadi, west of the crash site, where an anti-U.S. leaflet warned,
just two days before the shootdown, that Iraq’s insurgents
would strike the Americans with “modern and advanced
methods.”

The downing of the CH-47 Chinook, one of two carrying dozens of
soldiers on their way to Baghdad airport and home leave, killed 16
Americans and wounded 20 others. It was the heaviest U.S. death
toll in any single action since the invasion of Iraq last March
20.

One victim, Ernest Bucklew, 33, had been expected to stop at his
Fort Carson, Colo., home before traveling to his mother’s
funeral. His wife, Barbara, wept as she spoke of breaking the news
to the couple’s two children, 8-year-old Joshua and
4-year-old Justin.

“My oldest one is just a little numb,” she said at
the Army post near Colorado Springs, Colo., shrouded in fog and a
cold rain. “He understands his nana and father passed away,
but he hasn’t talked about it. The youngest one just
doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand the concept
of death right now.”

Sixteen of the injured were flown by U.S. Air Force C-17
transport yesterday to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and treated at
the U.S. military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. Nine
were admitted to the intensive care unit, including five in serious
condition, said hospital spokeswoman Marie Shaw.

“They are being evaluated and surgeries are planned
throughout the day,” she said.

Villagers who saw the helicopter downing south of Fallujah, 35
miles west of Baghdad, said it was struck from behind by one or two
missiles apparently fired from a date palm grove in the area, deep
in the Sunni Muslim heartland that has produced the most violent
opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Hundreds of portable, shoulder-fired missiles are unaccounted
for in Iraq, potential threats to a U.S. occupation army that
relies heavily on the slow, low-flying CH-47 Chinook craft for
troop transport. The U.S. command has offered Iraqis $500 apiece
for each portable missile turned in but has refused to say how many
have been surrendered.

In one search operation yesterday, U.S. military police
stretched out razor wire and set up checkpoints along the main
artery running north from Baghdad, now dubbed “Highway
1,” to look for weapons, including anti-aircraft
missiles.

“We have had indication that more of stuff like this
(missiles) are moving out there,” said Lt. Col. Dave Poirier,
commander of the 720th Military Police Battalion. “People
know they are taking a big chance in transporting weapons …
and for some of these large weapons systems, you’d have to
have a truck to transport it.”

Spc. Andrew Fifield of San Antonio, Texas, jumped on top of a
truck transporting pomegranates and picked through the fruit
carefully.

As he dug through dried manure atop a second truck, he motioned
to Iraqi policemen to join him. None did.

“A lot of them were not police as we’d know police
back home to be,” Poirier said. “Some of them were
never policemen before this.”

The explosion in Karbala, 65 miles south of Baghdad, apparently
was caused by a bomb planted in a parked car on a busy street less
than 100 yards from the gold-domed Imam Hussein shrine, said
Mohammed Abu Jaffar al-Assadi, a Shiite cleric. Other witnesses
said it might have been concealed in a bag left outside a
hotel.

In addition to at least one dead, it was believed 12 people were
wounded, al-Assadi said. It was not immediately possible to get
confirmation of the report from Iraqi police or the U.S.-led
coalition.

Karbala has been rocked by deadly clashes between supporters of
rival Shiite factions.

Here in the capital, U.S. occupation authorities said three
mortar rounds were lobbed from a firing position somewhere in
southwestern Baghdad late yesterday. Two landed in unspecified
locations in central Baghdad, and the third struck a camp of the
2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. They said no injuries were
immediately reported.