British troops clashed with Iraqi militiamen here, as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan sacked his security chief, after a report said negligence added to the death toll in August's bombing of the UN Baghdad office.

Two British soldiers were slightly injured Monday as they tried to evict militiamen from a building in the southern Iraqi port city of Basra that belongs to a local women's organization, the British military spokesman said. A spokesman for the militia group ,said five of his comrades were hurt in the fighting. A coalition official in Baghdad said a vehicle was damaged and a soldier had his pistol stolen in the 25-minute incident. Basra government officials sent the militiamen an order to vacate the premises 10 days earlier, but the group refused to budge.

In Baghdad, the US military accepted responsibility for the "accidental" killing of two Iraqi journalists working for the Al-Arabiya satellite news channel. Cameraman Ali Abdul Aziz, 35, and reporter Ali al-Khatib, 32, were working for the Dubai-based television when they were shot on March 18 during an incident near the Burj al-Hayat hotel in central Baghdad following a rocket attack.

In Washington, NATO's secretary general said a UN Security Council mandate is "politically essential" for the alliance to take on a larger role in any international force in Iraq after the transfer of sovereignty on July 1. If the Security Council approves such a mandate and Iraq's new government asks NATO to take over part of the force, "I think the NATO allies would enter that discussion with a very positive attitude," NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said.

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And in Paris, a public tussle over who has the right to represent ousted dictator Saddam Hussein broke out between a French and a Jordanian lawyer, each claiming they had been given the high-profile case by relatives of the ousted Iraqi president. Jacques Verges, a French lawyer said he had received a letter from Saddam's nephew Ali Barzan al-Tikriti asking him to represent his uncle, captured by US forces in Iraq in December. But Jordanian lawyer Mohammad Rashdan, who represented Saddam over Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, said that he had been contacted by Saddam's wife and eldest daughter.