"There's certainly a warning that Baghdad is a dangerous location for anyone that is present in there, and that the regime continues to put them at deliberate risk," Brigadier General Vincent Brooks said.

"We have always said that the area for combat operations is a very dangerous place indeed. Certainly there should be no surprise in anyone's mind that operations were eventually going to close on Baghdad," he said.

In two separate incidents, US fire on the Iraqi capital killed three television journalists from Al-Jazeera, Reuters news agency and Spanish network Telecinco.

A US missile crashed into the offices of Al-Jazeera in downtown Baghdad, killing Tareq Ayub, a correspondent with the Arabic satellite news channel, and wounding one of its cameramen.

Taras Protsyuk, a Ukranian cameraman with Reuters news agency, and Jose Couso from Telecinco, were killed after a US tank fired on the Palestine Hotel, where most of the foreign media are based. Three other Reuters staff were injured.

"We certainly know that we don't target journalists," Brooks said at US Central Command's base in Qatar. "That's just not something we do."

After Brooks said that US forces had received fire from the lobby of the hotel, a journalist asked why the tank had then shot into the upper floors of the Palestine.

Brooks said he "may have misspoken" and said that reports were still coming in from the field. Central Command then issued an update saying that US forces had come under "significant enemy fire" in both incidents.

"These tragic incidents appear to be the latest example of the Iraqi regimes continued strategy of using civilian facilities for regime military purposes," it said.

"Coalition forces target only legitimate military targets and go to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties and damage to civilian facilities," Central Command said.

SPACE.WIRE