US denies deliberately targeting Al-Jazeera

A US military spokeswoman denied on Tuesday that US forces had targeted the Al-Jazeera television station in Baghdad.

A US military spokeswoman denied on Tuesday that US forces had targeted the Al-Jazeera television station in Baghdad, which the network said was hit by a US missile killing a correspondent.

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"We did not target Al-Jazeera," Major Rumi Nielson-Green said here at the US base directing the war on Iraq.

"We only target legitimate military targets."

Qatar-based Al-Jazeera reported earlier that Baghdad correspondent Tareq Ayub died of his injuries following a US missile strike on the station's Baghdad offices.

A cameraman, Zuheir al-Iraqi, was hit in the neck by shrapnel in the blast, which the network charged was a deliberate strike.

Al-Jazeera's presenter accused the US military of "deliberately targeting" its offices and recalled that the station's Kabul bureau had been hit in November 2001 during the US-led assault on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.