BAGHDAD, Nov. 3 (Xinhuanet) -- A compound used by the US-ledcoalition forces was hit by one of the at least three shells that landed in central Baghdad late Monday but no casualties were caused, the coalition said.

    "There were three to four mortar impacts in central Baghdad,"said a US spokesman, adding that there were no casualties."We don't know where they came from, where they landed, but what we do know is that one of them landed in the so-called Green Zone,"he told Xinhua.

    Meanwhile, CNN quoted a coalition statement as saying that oneof the three projectiles hit a US camp causing no casualties andthe locations of the other two were unknown yet.

    The quoted statement said one projectile exploded at a facilityof the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment and the other two landed in areas in central Baghdad.

    Local residents said they heard four or five relatively hugeexplosions around 9:10 p.m. (0610 GMT) from the direction of the coalition headquarters in central Baghdad.

    In a separate incident, a bomb planted in a parked car went offin a busy street in the southern holy city of Karbala on Monday,killing three people, sources said.

    It was the latest of several bomb attacks that occurred in thevast central southern area dominated by the majority Shiite Muslim.Late August, a devastating car bombing killed 83 people including the top Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammed Baquer al-Hakim.Monday's incidents followed a sophisticated resistant operation that shot down a US military transport helicopter near Fallujah in western Iraq on Sunday.

    US military officers said that the death toll has risen to 16 while 20 others were wounded in the incident.

    They said the cause of the crash landing was still under investigation although it was believed that the attack weapons were surface-to-air missiles.

    A widely spread rumor had said that a so-called Baath Party Regional Command threatened to mount fresh attacks on Nov. 1 andthe following days, dubbed as "day of resistance."

    US civil administrator Paul Bremer said there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was behind these attacks but his loyalists and foreign militants were to be blamed. Enditem