[Western warplanes target a playing field in a northern Iraqi town. Read photo caption below]

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq said on Wednesday 23 people were killed and 11 wounded when Western warplanes targeted a playing field in a northern Iraqi town, but Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld charged that Iraqi ground fire might have caused any such deaths.
The Iraqi News Agency INA said U.S. and British warplanes raided Talafar district near the city of Mosul. It did not say in its report when the raid took place but, questioned by phone, the agency said it occurred on Tuesday.
``The raids, which targeted a football field, martyred 23 citizens and wounded 11 others who were playing football,'' it said.
Britain and the United States denied any air attack, and Rumsfeld told reporters in Washington that American and British warplanes were fired on by anti-aircraft guns and perhaps two missiles when they flew over Iraq on Tuesday.
``They (bullets and missiles) were not anywhere near our airplanes. The coalition (aircraft) did not fire in response,'' he told reporters in response to questions about the incident at the Pentagon.
``And in the event that anyone was killed, it was undoubtedly the result of misdirected ground fire that ended up in a location that was not intended.''
PUBLIC MOURNING
``Coalition forces (U.S. and British aircraft) did not conduct any raids on northern Iraq yesterday,'' Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told Reuters in Washington.
``We conducted routine enforcement of the no-fly zone. We did not engage. All our aircraft returned safely,'' said a spokesman for the U.S. European Command, based in Germany. The Ministry of Defense in London also said no weapons had been dropped.
But the Iraqi agency said thousands of people had mourned the victims Wednesday at Talafar.
``They hit out at the United States and Britain blaming them for the incident,'' it said.
In a report on Tuesday, also denied by the Western allies, Iraq said its anti-aircraft defenses had hit one of a group of allied planes that patrol the northern no-fly zone from their air base in southern Turkey.
Western air raids have become a regular occurrence since Baghdad decided in December 1998 to challenge jets patrolling the northern and southern no-fly zones that were set up by Western powers after the 1991 Gulf War.
Tuesday's is the highest single-day death toll reported by Iraq since that challenge prompted the United States and Britain to conduct a four-day ``Desert Fox'' campaign at targets across Iraq at the end of 1998.
If confirmed, it would bring the reported toll from frequent bombings since then to more than 300 dead and 1,000 wounded.
In the previous deadliest toll since Desert Fox, Iraq says 19 civilians were killed in widespread raids on Aug. 17, 1999.
The two no-fly zones were set up after the expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991 to protect Kurdish dissidents in northern Iraq and anti-Baghdad Shi'ite Muslims in the south from attack by the Iraqi army.
Iraq does not recognize the zones and allied forces say that since the end of 1998, they have been regularly threatened by Iraqi anti-aircraft units and have fired bombs and missiles back at them.
U.S. and British forces have also staged large-scale raids on wider targets in Iraq, at times incurring the wrath of their own Western partners.
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PHOTO CAPTION

Iraq said on June 20, 2001 on 23 people died and 11 were wounded when Western warplanes targeted a playing field in a northern Iraqi town, but Britain and the United States denied any attack. (Reuters Graphic)
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