Iraqi killed as US troops open fire on car

American troops opened fire and killed a passenger in a car in central Iraq after the vehicle failed to heed warnings to keep its distance from a military convoy, the US military said Tuesday. "In Baquba, a passenger in a vehicle was mortally wounded after the driver of the vehicle failed to respond to repeated warning signals from a convoy," a statement said. A soldier opened fire after the car drove towards the convoy at an intersection despite the warnings, the military said, adding the driver of the vehicle was unharmed. The incident marked the second shooting of an Iraqi civilian by US forces in less than week after US soldiers opened fire and critically wounded a newly-wed Iraqi female television producer in Baghdad on January 1. The US military said 25-year-old Hadeel Emad failed to heed warnings from American soldiers and was behaving "erratically." Colleagues said the producer had failed to heed warning shots because she had impaired hearing. In a separate incident on Sunday, in the restive northern city of Mosul, US and Iraqi forces killed two people and wounded two others when the vehicle they were driving accelerated towards a checkpoint, the US military said. "The driver of the vehicle ignored ... orders to stop and continued to accelerate," it said. Security forces attempted to stop a vehicle driven by a "suspected terrorist" but it continued to accelerate and raced through a checkpoint, the military said. As the vehicle passed a second checkpoint, Iraqi and US forces opened fire and the car came to a stop. "One terrorist was killed during the engagement. A woman in the vehicle was also killed, and another woman and man were injured," the US military said. The US military considers Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, to be the last urban stronghold of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group believed to be behind scores of devastating bombings since the 2003 US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein. Baquba, capital of Diyala province and long a Sunni insurgent stronghold, is considered equally dangerous.