BAGHDAD, Jan 18: Ten Iraqi bodyguards and drivers were killed on Wednesday and two foreign telephone engineers were feared kidnapped, after gunmen ambushed a convoy in a Baghdad road tunnel.

The attack came as the kidnappers of US journalist Jill Carroll threatened to kill her if US forces did not free all female Iraqi prisoners within 72 hours.

Meanwhile, the sister of Interior Minister Bayan Jabr Solagh, who was kidnapped on Jan 3, a few days before Jill Carroll, was freed on Wednesday.

Nine more Iraqis were killed in attacks nationwide on Wednesday, while the bodies of 11 policemen and soldiers were discovered in a makeshift grave.

Two foreign engineers were kidnapped in the ambush on the three-car convoy of the Iraqna mobile phone company, an interior ministry official said, adding that three drivers and seven bodyguards were killed.

Shamel Hanafi, chief commercial officer for Iraqna, said the engineers were from Malawi and Madagascar. “We don’t know whether they were kidnapped, or whether they ran away or are hiding after the attack,” he said.

The government in Malawi, which has no diplomatic relations with Iraq, said it was investigating the report.

The convoy had been on its way to the western suburb of Abu Ghraib to repair a transmitter station when the attack occurred, officials at the hospital were told.

In other incidents of violence on Wednesday, Sunni tribal leader Mohammed Sadek al Batah from the restive Al Anbar province was shot dead in a flat in western Baghdad along with a nephew and an associate.

In Saadiya, northeast of Baghdad near the Iranian border, a roadside bombing targeting a police patrol killed four policeman and a civilian.

The US army reported finding the bodies of 11 men in police or army uniforms, in a makeshift grave near Attarmiyah. A bomb targeting a convoy north of Basra killed one and wounded two.—AFP