29 July 2004	Thursday	11 Jamadi-us-Saani 1425

DUBAI, July 28: Militants in Iraq have killed two Pakistani hostages and have released an Iraqi, Al Jazeera television said late Wednesday night. Al Jazeera said it had received a video tape showing the killings but would not air it as it was too gruesome.

The kidnappers had vowed in a video tape shown on Al Jazeera on Monday that they would kill the Pakistanis and threatened to do the same to the Iraqi if their employer did not halt operations in Iraq. They said they freed the Iraqi after he "recanted".

The group has distributed a video showing their bodies, the Qatar-based channel said, adding however it would not air the footage "out of respect for viewers' feelings".

Al Jazeera's earlier broadcast showed the identity cards and video footage of what appeared to be the two Pakistanis who disappeared last week while working for the Kuwaiti branch of Saudi group Al Tamimi. The Iraqi was also seen on the video.

An official from Al Tamimi had told Reuters the group would not encourage the captors but at the same time the lives of its employees were important. He said the firm had commitments in Iraq to honour.

Al Tamimi does work in Iraq for US firm Kellogg, Brown and Root, a contractor to the US military. Pakistan had said it believed two of its nationals missing in Iraq since Friday had been kidnapped, identifying them at the weekend as Raja Azad Khan and Sajjad Naeem.

The news of the beheading came as Iraq's interim government witnessed one of of the bloodiest days since its take over from the US-led troops. At least 120 people were killed in a suicide bombing and clashes on Wednesday as Iraq's interim government marked its first month in office embroiled in deadly violence and a hostage crisis.

Up to 68 were killed and dozens wounded in the morning blast in the town of Baquba, north of Baghdad, that struck as dozens of police recruits queued up outside a police post seeking work and a bus passed by laden with passengers.

"The hospital officials have told me that 68 were dead and 56 injured in the Baquba blast," Health Minister Alaadin Alwan told AFP. A doctor at Baquba hospital put the number of injured as high as 70, adding that emergency workers were continuing to collect bodies from the scene of the explosion.

An AFP correspondent said he saw at least a dozen bodies lined up outside the hospital's morgue, already crammed to capacity with the dead. Dozens of maimed bodies were strewn outside the police post amid pools of blood mixed into the mud.

Provincial police chief Gen Walid Khaled Abdel Salam confirmed that a suicide bomber triggered the massive explosion outside the rapid reaction unit building at about 9:30am (0530 GMT).

Police officer Mohammed Jassim said the area had been jammed with people at the time of the blast. "Young men were queuing outside to join the police and a bus passed by," he said.

Another officer said 600 police recruits were due to come to the station on Wednesday and Thursday. It was impossible to squeeze all the applicants into the building, so some had to wait outside.

"We tried to force them back, but they wouldn't listen. A car just came by and blew up in their midst." Nervous police began firing into the air as residents, desperate for news of loved ones, tried to get to the scene.

The Sunni belt north and west from the capital has seen almost daily attacks and car bombings against symbols of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's caretaker government. The bombing came three days after US-backed Iraqi security forces and police killed 13 insurgents in a blistering shootout in nearby Buhruz.

Baquba has suffered frequent attacks targeting US-backed Iraqi security forces, some of which have been claimed by Al-Qaeda's suspected chief in Iraq, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.

Meanwhile, 35 insurgents and seven Iraqi troops were killed in a joint raid with multinational soldiers south of Baghdad, the US military said. The region has been largely quiet since the end of an uprising by Shia leader Moqtada Sadr earlier this year.

West of Fallujah, four Iraqi policemen were killed and one was wounded when a home made bomb targeted a joint US and Iraqi convoy, a local security officer said. In Baghdad, two people were killed, including a 13-year-old child, when a projectile landed in a central residential district.

In the northern oil centre of Kirkuk, two Iraqis suspected of trying to bomb an oil pipeline were shot dead as a policeman was killed making his way home, police said. Three sons of the governor of Iraq's restive Al-Anbar province, where many foreign hostages are thought to be hidden, were kidnapped by gunmen who barged into the official's private home in the flash point city of Ramadi, police said. -AFP