19 September 2004	Sunday	03 Shaban 1425

KIRKUK, Sept 18: At least 23 people were killed and over 60 wounded in a suicide bombing in Kirkuk on Saturday, capping a week of carnage in Iraq. A suicide bomber smashed through the security barriers outside Iraqi national guard headquarters in Kirkuk.

The vehicle passed through three barriers before it reached the outer gate of the building and exploded, sending shrapnel flying into a crowd of national guard recruits lined up outside.

Ambulances raced to the site and police fired warning shots in the air.

A car bomb also hit a US convoy on the main airport road in Baghdad, killing an Iraqi and wounding three soldiers.

HOSTAGES: Loyalists of suspected Al Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al Zarqawi has threatened to kill two Americans and a Briton unless Iraqi women prisoners are freed within 48 hours, according to a videotape broadcast on Al Jazeera television.

The US military said only two Iraqi women, both of them high-security detainees believed to have been instrumental in ousted president Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons programmes, are being held in the country.

Three blindfolded men were shown sitting in front of gunmen dressed entirely in black, pointing their guns at the pale-faced hostages.

Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene "Jack" Armstrong and British engineer Kenneth Bigley were abducted by gunmen from their Baghdad home on Thursday.

FIVE GUARDS KILLED: In further violence, five bodyguards for Mohammed Ahmed Zebari, a senior oil ministry official in Mosul, died in a hail of gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire in the northern city, said police. Mr Zebari emerged unscathed from his car.

A child also died when a bomb exploded near his parents' home in Hilla, south of Baghdad.

In Baquba, nine people were wounded by shrapnel when a mortar round struck a crowd of students and parents awaiting exam results outside a school, police and hospital sources said.

Again in the Kirkuk area, gunmen shot dead a Shia Arab tribal leader. Sheikh Khadem al Hani was killed and two of his bodyguards wounded when gunmen ambushed them north of the city, said local police chief Turhan Yusef.

GOVERNOR SHOT DEAD: In western Iraq, the body of Bassem Mohammed, deputy governor of Al Anbar province, was found in an open field near Ramadi, a police official said.

Mohammed had been kidnapped on Sept 8.

KIDNAPPED: A militant Iraqi group has kidnapped 10 employees of a US-Turkish company and threatened to kill them if the company does not withdraw from Iraq within three days, Al Jazeera television said on Saturday.-AFP/Reuters