IRAQ: A militant group led by al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said yesterday it had beheaded an American hostage and it posted a video of the killing on the internet.
The video, on an Islamist website, identified the hostage as Mr Eugene Armstrong and showed a masked man sawing his head off with a knife. A US official said Armstrong's body had been recovered.
The video showed the banner of Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad group, which said it had kidnapped the hostage along with another American and a Briton and set a 48-hour deadline on Saturday to kill them.
In the video, five armed and masked men stood around the hostage, who was dressed in an orange overall, typical of US jails and associated around the world with images of Muslims detained at Guantanamo Bay.
After reading a lengthy statement, during which the hostage sat rocking on the floor, one of the gunmen decapitated him.
They said they had killed the American hostage because the US had failed to free women prisoners in Iraqi jails. They gave another 24 hours for the US to do so, or the other two hostages would be killed.
Tawhid and Jihad, in a video posted on the internet on Saturday, said it would slit the throats of Armstrong, American Mr Jack Hensley and Briton Mr Kenneth Bigley unless Iraqi women were freed from the Abu Ghraib and Umm Qasr prisons by Monday.
The US military says no women are being held in the two prisons specified, but that two are in US custody and are accused of working on ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's weapons programme.
Zarqawi's group has said it was responsible for most of the bloodiest suicide bombings in Iraq since the fall of Saddam. It has beheaded several hostages, including US telecoms engineer Nicholas Berg in May and South Korean driver Kim Sun-il in June.
The group released Filipino captive Angelo de la Cruz in July after Manila bowed to its demands to pull out troops.
The United States has offered $25 million for information leading to the death or capture of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, and has launched a series of air strikes on his suspected hideouts in the rebel-held town of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. The latest strike was on Monday afternoon, residents said. Doctors said at least two people were killed.
Another Islamist group freed 18 Iraqi soldiers it had threatened to kill, but more than a dozen other hostages are still facing death unless demands from their captors are met.
A statement purportedly from the group holding two French journalists said at the weekend they were no longer captives, but had agreed to stay with the group for some time to report on its activities. France said yesterday it was preparing for a long wait.
Another group has threatened to kill 10 workers from a US-Turkish firm unless their company stopped doing business in Iraq within three days. Most of the workers seized are Turks.
On Sunday a guerrilla group said it had captured 18 Iraqi soldiers and would kill them unless authorities freed an aide to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, Hazem al-Araji, within 48 hours.
Araji was arrested on Saturday night by US-backed forces.
The release of the Iraqi soldiers followed an appeal by a Sadr aide, Ali Smeisim, for the hitherto unknown group, the Mohammad bin Abdullah Brigades, to free them.