Militants led by Washington's top foe in Iraq said they would kill an American and a Briton yesterday unless their demands were met, a day after they released footage showing them severing the head of another US hostage.
The video footage released on Monday shows US contractor Eugene Armstrong sitting blindfolded on the floor in an orange jumpsuit, with black-clad hooded gunmen standing behind him. Armstrong rocks back and forth as a militant reads a statement. Then one of the men grabs him and saws off his head with a knife.
Armstrong was seized in Baghdad last Thursday along with fellow Jack Hensley and Briton Kenneth Bigley.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday that the US cannot wilt in the face of the Iraqi insurgency and suggested critics of the war in Iraq were becoming rattled and defeatist.
"We can't just wilt in the face of this kind of challenge, we have to meet the challenge," Powell told ABC's Good Morning America program.
The Tawhid and Jihad group led by al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said in the footage of Armstrong's killing it would behead the other two hostages within 24 hours unless female inmates were released from the Abu Ghraib and Umm Qasr jails.
The US military says it does not hold any female prisoners in either of those two jails, and that only two women are in US detention in Iraq. The two, dubbed "Mrs Anthrax" and "Dr Germ" by US forces, are accused of working on former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's weapons programs and held at a secret high-security camp.
Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded on Baghdad's airport road yesterday as a US military convoy was passing by, wounding four American soldiers and destroying an armored Humvee, the US military said.
Around 10 civilian vehicles were also wrecked in the blast, a police official said on condition of anonymity. He said there were civilian casualties but did not immediately have an exact figure.
Insurgents also attacked an Iraqi National Guard patrol south of Baghdad yesterday, killing three Guards and wounding two others, local police said.
The incident occurred in Latifijah, 40km south of the capital.
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