Troops injured in traffic accident in Basra
Britain's Ministry of Defence officials have discounted reports that a British soldier was injured in a land mine blast in Iraq on Saturday night.
Overnight reports from international wire agencies suggested that two Army Land Rovers had been caught up in an explosion near the Teaching Hospital in the southern city of Basra.
But a British MoD spokesman in London said the reports had been investigated by officers on the ground and found to be without foundation.
The only incident involving injury to British troops in Basra was a traffic accident in which two soldiers were lightly hurt when their Land Rover rolled over.
The news came as Britain's Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon played down the security threat faced by British troops in the south of the country, largely populated by Shia Muslims who suffered under the rule of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
Although UK personnel are constantly aware of the risk of attack, they are making "significant progress" in restoring normality in the south of Iraq, he told Sky News's Sunday programme.
Criminality was a bigger issue in their day-to-day operations than terrorism and paramilitary activity, which were largely confined to the capital Baghdad and the Sunni-dominated areas occupied by the US.
Mr Hoon said: "There are certainly very real concerns about security in a particular part of Baghdad and an area to the north-west of Baghdad.
"But I was in Iraq about two weeks ago visiting British troops, particularly in the south, where their biggest difficulty is not actually attacks by terrorists - although they remain on guard to prevent such attacks - but criminality and low-level disruption to their efforts to improve the everyday way of life for the Iraqi people.
"We are not complacent about the risk of attacks by terrorists, but that is not the picture across Iraq. The biggest difficulty remains in and around Baghdad."
