A man inside his house in Baghdad, damaged in an overnight air raid. (Reuters)

Falluja, June 20 (Reuters): Iraq’s Prime Minister today defended a US air strike that killed 22 people in Falluja, but Iraqi officers in the town said the dead included women and children rather than foreign Muslim militants.

“We know that a house which had been used by terrorists had been hit. We welcome this hit on terrorists anywhere in Iraq,” interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi told a news conference.

He said the US military had informed the government before carrying out yesterday’s air strike on what it said was a safe house used by militants led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian described by the Americans as al Qaida’s leader in Iraq.

However, Falluja’s police chief and a senior officer in the Falluja Brigade in charge of security in the fiercely anti-US town denied that foreign fighters had operated from the house.

“We inspected the damage, we looked through the bodies of the women and children and elderly. This was a family,” Brigadier Nouri Aboud of the Falluja Brigade said.

“There is no sign of foreigners having lived in the house. Zarqawi and his men have no presence in Falluja.”

The US military allowed the Falluja Brigade, led by former Iraqi army officers, to take over security in the town under a truce last month that ended battles between US Marines and insurgents in which hundreds of people were killed.

The raid shattered a lull in Falluja and fuelled tensions before the formal end of Iraq’s US-led occupation on June 30. Since the truce, Falluja has been quieter, although the US military said a Marine was killed in action yesterday in western Iraq — the 615th US combat death since the invasion.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said in Baghdad the destroyed house in Falluja was being used by fighters loyal to Zarqawi, accused by Washington of leading a bloody campaign of suicide bombings and of decapitating a US hostage last month.

The Iraqi government says foreign militants are involved in sabotage that last week brought vital oil exports to a halt.

Exports remained halted today as technicians continued working on a sabotaged pipeline feeding southern terminals, a Coalition Provisional Authority spokesperson said.

“Repairs were continuing as of 16:10 pm (local time/1210 GMT). There are no crude oil exports at the moment, according to our South Oil Company contacts,” said Dominic D’Angelo, dismissing earlier reports that the pipeline was repaired.

Insurgents, believed to include loyalists of Saddam Hussein, Sunni nationalists and foreign militants, have sown havoc ahead of the June 30 handover to a new interim Iraqi government.

The home of interior minister Faleh al-Naqib came under rocket fire in the town of Samarra, northwest of Baghdad, last night, police said. Naqib was not there at the time, but four of his bodyguards were killed.

In Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, further north, unidentified gunmen killed a local council member, Izzeddin Ibrahim Abdullah, and a bodyguard last night, police said.