Alex Berenson/NYT NYT

Incident is expected to add to tension at a center of resistance

FALLUJA, Iraq American soldiers killed at least eight Iraqi policemen and a Jordanian hospital worker in a gun battle Friday outside a hospital here, residents and town officials said.

Falluja is already a center of Iraqi resistance to the American-led occupation, and the killings Friday were seen as likely to further incite the city.

The firefight began when Iraqi police officers chasing a stolen BMW came across an American military patrol that included at least two tanks, according to Abdul Jalil, a local policeman who was wounded in the shootout.

The tanks opened fire, forcing the police vehicles off the road near the Jordanian Hospital, a concrete complex of buildings east of the center of Falluja, a city about 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, west of Baghdad. The BMW apparently escaped.

Hearing the shots, guards inside the hospital opened fire on the road, prompting the tanks to attack the hospital, residents and hospital security guards said. The American soldiers and tanks then began to fire indiscriminately for nearly an hour on both the hospital and the police vehicles, they said.

Jalil said that American troops had killed at least one Iraqi police officer from less than 6 meters, or 20 feet away, even after he repeatedly identified himself as a police officer.

The position of weapons shells, tank treads and human remains at the scene of the battle showed that U.S. soldiers could have been no more than 15 meters from the wounded and killed police officers for at least part of the fight.

"At the end of the car, he was shouting, 'I'm a policeman, I'm a policeman,'" Jalil said from a bed at the Falluja hospital, where he was recovering from wounds to his leg, abdomen and shoulder. The American soldiers continued shooting, Jalil said.

An American military spokesman said Friday evening that the United States was investigating the deaths and could not comment.

Meanwhile, two more U.S. soldiers were killed in a firefight early Friday morning in Ramadi, another center of Iraqi resistance, the spokesman said. The deaths raised to 292 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq or Kuwait since the beginning of the Iraq war, including 150 since President George W. Bush declared on May 1 that major American combat operations had ended.

By Friday afternoon, most of the debris had been removed from outside the hospital here, which sits about 60 meters from a major road that connects Falluja and Baghdad.

But bloodied scraps of clothing and skin remained on the gravel beside the road where the Iraqi vehicles had stopped. About 15 meters away, hundreds of shells littered the ground, apparently where U.S. soldiers had positioned machine guns to rake the hospital. Many larger caliber shells, including those from M-169 rounds, which are fired by tanks and armored vehicles and are nearly four centimeters wide, could also be seen.

The attack severely damaged one of the hospital's buildings, which had large holes and soot in its concrete facade. The deaths will further poison the relationship between U.S. soldiers and residents of Falluja, where U.S. troops already face grenade or small-arms attacks daily, relatives and friends of the wounded policemen said.

Falluja is part of the Sunni Triangle, an area north and west of Baghdad that has been the center of resistance to the American occupation. Sunni Muslim Arabs make up one-fifth of the population of Iraq but have long dominated the country's political and economic life, and many Sunnis fear that the United States occupation may end that primacy. "This is supposed to be a cemetery for the Americans," said Yassir Abd, Jalil's brother. "We will shoot any artillery or armored vehicles."

As if to prove his point, a U.S. military convoy came under fire in late afternoon on a major road less than two kilometers from the Falluja hospital and remained trapped for more than an hour.

"We still have a mandate under the Security Council. We hope to be able to go back to Iraq to complete our job," said Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, after a weeklong meeting of the agency's board of governors. UN inspectors returned to Baghdad late last year to hunt for Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction.