The dead soldiers have been identified as being Military Police - there to help set up and restructure the local police force.
A crying shame.
The story on sky news:
http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-12356593,00.html
'TROOPS FIRED FIRST'
An Iraqi policeman has said the six British soldiers who were killed yesterday had opened fire on a crowd of civilian demonstrators - killing four.
The policeman said armed civilians then killed two of the soldiers at the scene of the demonstration, Associated Press reported.
The civilians then chased the other four soldiers to a police station, where the troops were killed after a two hour gunbattle, the policeman Abbas Faddhel said.
Other reports from Iraqi witnesses said the shooting began when the troops opened fire with plastic bullets on a crowd of demonstrators after days of tension.
The crowd, believing the bullets were real, fired back.
Defence Secretary Geoff Honn confirmed on Sky News that there had been an incident in which British troops had opened fire.
He said: "Certainly there was an exchange of fire and British forces came under attack and they responded robustly as they are entitled to do."
He said he could not give any further details and an investigation is underway.
Other reports said civilians in the town where the soldiers were killed were angry at intrusive searches for weapons by troops.
The bodies of the six - from the Royal Military police - were found on Tuesday in the town of Al Majar al Kabir, 120 miles north of Basra, where they had been training local police.
Eight more soldiers were injured in a separate incident five hours earlier.
Mr Hoon said he could not rule out sending more troops back to Iraq.
Attack south of Baghdad
The deaths are the heaviest British combat casualties since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Hours before the deaths, troops from the 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment patrolling the town came under attack from rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and rifle fire from "a large number of Iraqi gunmen".
A quick reaction force, including a troop of Scimitar armoured vehicles and a Chinook helicopter, called in to assist them also came under fire.
Seven men in the helicopter and one man on the ground were injured in the fighting.
In Washington, Pentagon officials said insurgents had carried out 25 attacks on US forces over a 24-hour period.
Unlike the Americans, the British have encountered little in the way of resistance since the fall of Baghdad, though senior British commanders have warned that they expected rogue guerrilla elements to continue to operate.
Captain Dennis Abbott, a military spokesman in Basra, said: "This was an isolated incident and in no way reflects the general security situation across the UK area of operations."
Since the fall of Iraq, UK troops had previously suffered no major attacks and had been patrolling the streets in berets and caps rather than helmets.
The deaths of the six military police brought the total number of British personnel killed since the start of the conflict to 43.