IRAQ: Militants held a Filipino and two Bulgarians under death threat in Iraq yesterday. They are demanding that Manila withdraw its troops and for US-led forces to release prisoners.
A US marine who turned up in his native Lebanon after going missing in Iraq left Beirut on a US military aircraft for a base in Germany, but there was still no word on whether he had been abducted or how he reached Lebanon.
A Marine Corps spokesman in Washington said a preliminary inquiry suggested Wassef Ali Hassoun had deserted his unit in Iraq on June 21st. His status was changed to "captured" a week later, after video footage showed him being held hostage.
Kidnappings have increased pressure on Mr Iyad Allawi's government, trying to assert its authority after taking over from US-led occupiers on June 28th, but still dependent for security on 160,000 mainly American troops.
Underlining the gravity of the crisis, Mr Allawi has dropped plans to visit Brussels next week due to security problems in Iraq.
US officials have acknowledged they did not expect American forces to be fighting insurgents in Iraq more than a year after last year's invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
A mortar strike near a hotel in central Baghdad yesterday killed one child and wounded three people, emergency workers said.
The US military said rebels killed five soldiers in Samarra, north of Baghdad, on Thursday and one died after an ambush in the Iraqi capital, bringing the US combat toll in Iraq to at least 652 since the start of the war.
Bulgaria, which has contributed 470 troops to the US-led multinational force in Iraq, vowed not to bow to demands by the kidnappers of civilian truck drivers Ivailo Kepov and Georgi Lazov, seized after unloading cars in Mosul.
"Bulgaria is a stable state . . . and we cannot expect it would change its foreign policy because of one or another group," the Foreign Minister, Mr Solomon Passy, said.
On Thursday a group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which has already beheaded an American and a South Korean in Iraq, said it would kill the Bulgarians within 24 hours unless US-led forces released prisoners.
The US has branded Zarqawi an al-Qaeda ally and its top target in Iraq with a $25 million bounty.
Masked gunmen threatened in a videotaped message yesterday to kill "the criminal Zarqawi" and his followers. They said they belonged to the Saif al-Allah (Sword of God) group.
There was no way to verify the existence of the group, which threatened in another videotape this week to behead any lawyers who defend Saddam in a future trial.
Saddam, captured by US forces in December, faced an Iraqi judge last week.
Interim Human Rights Minister Mr Bakhtiar Amin said Saddam would get a fair trial in Iraq - rejecting assertions by the former dictator's defence team that this was impossible.
"We have to set a new precedent and we are different from Saddam and his regime. We are all victims and he will be tried fairly," Mr Amin, a Kurd, said.
He said a new law unveiled this week enabling the government to impose a state of emergency had enough checks to prevent any return to the abuses of Saddam's rule.