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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Peaceful efforts to free Shi'ite hostages fail |
| 2005-04-17 |
| Peaceful efforts to secure the release of up to 60 Shia Muslim hostages threatened with death in a town near Baghdad have failed and Iraqi authorities are considering military action, officials said on Saturday. "Attempts to win their freedom through negotiations have not led to any results. The government is considering military intervention to end the standoff," an official in a leading Shia party told Reuters. The official, who declined to be named, said an increasing number of families are fleeing the town of Madaen. Sunni Muslim insurgents moved into Madaen with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 assault rifles on Friday night. In other violence, seven people, including three policemen, were killed and five others injured in a lunchtime explosion at a restaurant in Baquba. And the capital itself was the scene of another suicide car bombing, the fourth in three days, when a suicide bomber rammed into a US military-guarded civilian convoy in western Baghdad killing one Iraqi and wounding three, said an interior ministry source. The new unrest flared as talks continued among different political factions on forming a new government with representation across Iraq's religious and ethnic spectrum, more than 10 weeks after the landmark January elections. A US soldier, travelling in a convoy, was killed on Saturday by an explosion near Taji, north of Baghdad, the US military said. Insurgents killed three members of Iraq's security forces on Saturday, firing from speeding vehicles on army soldiers and policemen in a northern city, officials said. A Turkish trucker was killed early on Saturday when a roadside bomb exploded near the northern oil-refining town of Baiji setting his truck on fire, said Iraqi police. In another incident, two Filipinos — Francisco C Luz III, 26, and Shirlylyn Fortanilla, 29 — were slightly hurt when armed insurgents in three cars fired as they boarded a minibus in central Baghdad. Two more US soldiers died in separate attacks in Iraq, the US military said on Saturday. The Iraqi army meanwhile said it had killed in an ambush on Friday two leaders of Ansar Al Sunna, an Al Qaeda-linked network. Eleven Iraqis detained at a US prison in southern Iraq escaped on Saturday, but 10 were quickly recaptured, US officials said. The men broke out at around 1.30am after cutting a man-sized hole in the perimeter fence of Camp Bucca, a US-run facility near the town of Umm Qasr, where around 6,500 detainees are held. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |