Sun October 26, 2003 12:58 AM ET By Carol Giacomo
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Anti-American guerrillas attacked the Baghdad hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday with a barrage of rockets, but the No. 2 Pentagon official survived the blasts unharmed, U.S. officials said.
"We have unconfirmed reports of 15 wounded," said a military official. There are no reports of deaths. At least two wounded people were carried out of the hotel on stretchers, said a Reuters journalist at the Rashid Hotel, where the attack occurred at about 6 a.m. local time (11 p.m. EDT Saturday).
Wolfowitz was unharmed and led away by security forces, according to a U.S. defense official at the scene. Witnesses said Wolfowitz, a major force behind the Iraq war, looked composed.
Wolfowitz and senior aides were staying on the 12th floor when the rockets slammed into the hotel several floors below.
Members of his party, who had been dressing ahead of a breakfast meeting on electricity, calmly descended a stairwell past thickening smoke and blood stains. About 200 people, including his party, journalists and U.S. civilian contractors, gathered in the lobby before exiting the building.
"Based on what we have heard in security briefings it may have been that someone set these things up last night and then detonated them remotely," a senior defense official told reporters at the scene.
The official, who saw the rockets slam into the hotel from his room window, predicted there would probably be no more attacks on the party.
"That will have been the event for the day," he said.
A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Sgt. Danny Martin, said six to eight rockets hit the Rashid Hotel on the west side of the building.
Wolfowitz was paying his second visit to Iraq in three months and had stressed the need to speed up the formation of a new Iraqi army, police force, border guard and civil defense corps.
It was not clear if the attack would prompt Wolfowitz to cut short his trip. He was due to leave Iraq for Washington late Sunday night.
The Rashid hotel is part of a compound on the west bank of the Tigris river used by the U.S.-led administration.
It is in a fortified complex that includes palaces built by former leader Saddam Hussein and his elite troops.
Three rockets fired at the hotel by guerrillas on Sept. 27 hit the building but no one was wounded.
