BAGHDAD, Dec 10: Four US soldiers and three Iraqis died on Saturday while the fate of four Western hostages hung in limbo in an environment of chronic insecurity just days before a crucial general election. The four US soldiers were killed in firefights and a makeshift bomb attack in and around Baghdad, a military spokesman said.
According to the latest update on the Pentagon website, 2,138 US military personnel have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
Elsewhere, simmering outbreaks of violence claimed the lives of at least three Iraqis in Sunni hotspots.
One Iraqi soldier was killed and nine wounded in a bomb attack targeting an army patrol in the restive town of Balad.
In Mosul, a volatile city in northern Iraq, two civilians were killed and one wounded when a car bomb exploded as a US convoy rolled past, traffic police said. There was no word on US casualties.
HOSTAGES’ FATE: The fate of British, Canadian, and US peace activists was unknown as a deadline set by their captors to kill the four hostages ran out, leaving panicked relatives to fear the worst.
British grandfather Norman Kember, 74, US national Tom Fox, 54, and their Canadian colleagues from the Christian Peacemakers Team (CPT), James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, were seized in Baghdad two weeks ago.
Missing along with an abducted German mother, a French engineer and an American security contractor, the four were at the centre of a resurgent hostage crisis that underscored chaos in Iraq before the Dec 15 elections to elect a full-term parliament.
The Brigades of the Swords of Righteousness, believed to be holding the four Christian peace campaigners, demanded that Britain and the US free all prisoners held in Iraqi prisons.
Iraq’s justice minister announced the release on Saturday of 241 security detainees from the Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca prisons.—AFP
