IRAQ: Iraqi Prime Minister Mr Iyad Allawi said yesterday elections would be held on schedule in January despite a surge in violence and more than a score of hostages under threat of death from insurgents.
"We definitely are going to stick to the timetable of elections in January next year," said Mr Allawi in London after talks with British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair. Lawlessness in the last two weeks has claimed the lives of hundreds of people and had raised doubts that elections could go ahead.
An Islamist group has threatened to kill 15 captured Iraqi soldiers if authorities do not release an aide to Shia rebel cleric Mr Moqtada al-Sadr within 48 hours, Arab television station al- Jazeera reported yesterday.
It showed a video of masked gunmen and a group of uniformed men it said were members of the fledgling National Guard, which has come under fierce attack from insurgents.
The kidnappers were demanding the release of Mr Hazem al-Araji, a Shia cleric. Mr al-Sadr's supporters in Baghdad said US forces arrested Mr al-Araji in an overnight raid in the Iraqi capital.
An Iraqi Islamist group said it had beheaded three members of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which co-operates with Iraq's interim US-backed government.
An internet video tape from the army of Ansar al-Sunna appeared to show the heads of three young men being severed and placed on their bodies.
A militant group has threatened to kill three hostages today, two Americans and one Briton, and another group has threatened to kill 10 workers from a US-Turkish firm unless their demands are met. The two Americans and the Briton, seized in Baghdad on Thursday, work for a United Arab Emirates-based engineering company.
Internet video footage showed the hostages and a gunman, who said the Tawhid and Jihad group, led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, would kill the men unless Iraqi women prisoners were freed from Abu Ghraib or Umm Qasr jails within 48 hours.
The deadline expires this morning, measured from the time the footage first appeared. The US military said no women were held in either prison.
Only two women are in US custody in Iraq. The two, dubbed "Dr Germ" and "Mrs Anthrax" by US forces, allegedly worked on the weapons programmes of Saddam Hussein.
The women are held in a camp for high-value detainees.
There was no firm word on the fate of two French journalists and two Italian women aid workers being held. An unconfirmed report on Saturday said the French were no longer captives, but had agreed to spend some time with the group that seized them to cover its activities.
In Rome an Italian aid group yesterday sent a video montage of emotive images to Arab television of the two Italian women and two Iraqi colleagues in the hope of winning their release.
Meanwhile, a car bomb yesterday near the rebel stronghold of Samarra, north of Baghdad, killed an Iraqi soldier and wounded three US soldiers, the US military said.
A day earlier, a suicide car bomber killed at least 23 people queuing up for jobs with the Iraqi National Guard in the northern city of Kirkuk, hospital officials said.
Over the weekend in Baghdad, a car bomb killed two US soldiers as they went to the scene of an earlier suspected suicide car bomb attack that had wounded three soldiers.
Elsewhere, US aircraft rocketed targets in the rebel-held city of Falluja on Saturday night, said residents. Doctors said four people were killed in the strikes. The US military said it was targeting a checkpoint manned by insurgents.
Doctors said four more people were killed in a US attack on the city on Sunday morning.