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The United States has belatedly apologised for targeting a 12-year old Baghdad boy and his friends in their hunt for deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Saeed Hussein was celebrating his birthday with many of his school friends in a west Baghdad McDonald's franchise when the US military struck the restaurant earlier this week with an undisclosed number of missiles fired from warships in the Persian Gulf.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a media briefing in Washington that on-the-ground intelligence agents had reported that a person wearing a name tag "S Hussein" had been spotted in the popular McDonald's eatery.
"Look, it's an unfortunate accident but the boy's got to accept a fair bit of the blame for the misunderstanding," he quipped.
"He was apparently quite big for his age. Wearing a black beret didn't help his cause much either.
"Naturally, we deeply regret targeting a McDonald's outlet, but when top-shelf intelligence comes in, it would be a dereliction of duty not to act on it."
Mr Rumsfeld quipped that most of the birthday group had just ordered double quarter-pounders with cheese when the attack was signalled.
"That's when we surprised them with some 18-pounders with cheers of our own," he quipped.
But he added the McDonald's franchise owner had to accept some of the responsibility for the mishap.
"Selling the lad a chocolate thickshake so that he had a dark-milk chocolate moustache that made him a dead ringer for the Iraqi tyrant is surely the most flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention to come out of this entire Iraqi campaign - and there's been some doozeys.
"We'll certainly be taking up this matter with his widow."
Mr Rumsfeld quipped it would be nigh on impossible to ever determine just how many died in the mishap.
"But you can be rest assured that it's going to be a helluva lot less than the 193,456 Iraqis and a cat who were murdered in the two and a bit decades that the evil despot Hussein was in power.
"Besides, it could have been much worse. Luckily one of our smart bombs went off course and missed Baghdad altogether, landing on the Sunii Days Pre-School and Kindegarten in Tikrit just when parents were picking up their remaining children.
"I'm told they're still picking them up," Mr Rumsfeld quipped.
"We'll never know exactly how many were killed, although we do know there are several four-wheel-drive camels that won't be going on any long trips any more.
"But you can be rest assured that it's going to be a helluva lot less than the 193,456 Iraqis and a cat who were murdered in the two and a bit decades that the evil despot Hussein was in power," he quipped.
The Defence Secretary warned that similar accidental strikes were likely until Saddam was taken out.
"Only then will the world be truly free of the threat of indicriminate terrorist attacks that callously target innocent
civilians."

'We deeply regret targeting a McDonald's outlet'

Donald Rumsfeld