"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 targetting" 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.

SPACE.WIRE