BAGHDAD, Dec 8: Thirty people, mostly women, children and students, were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus in Baghdad on Thursday. The attack underscored the endemic insecurity plaguing Iraq just a week before a crucial general election to form the first full-term parliament since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Britain issued a new appeal for the release of foreign hostages in Iraq after kidnappers holding four Western peace activists extended a threatened deadline for their murder until Saturday.

In all too common scenes of bloody carnage, 30 Iraqis, mostly students, women and children were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself just on a bus as it drew out of a station en route for Nassiriyah.

“Some bodies were charred because the bus was completely burnt,” said a police official.

Most of the victims, including 25 wounded, were people living in Baghdad travelling south the day before the Iraqi weekend, witnesses and police said.

The bus was destroyed and two nearby stalls selling food and drinks gutted as the explosion sent shrapnel flying.

Iraqi rescue workers frantically dragged bodies out of the wreckage as a column of black smoke snaked into the sky and blood covered the ground.

The UN chief’s special envoy to Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, has expressed “serious concern” over election-related violence and on Thursday met Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to ask him to encourage Iraqis to vote.

A US soldier was killed in eastern Baghdad when his convoy was struck by a roadside bomb.

The offices of a party allied to former prime minister Iyad Allawi were ransacked in the southern town of Karbala, the second such attack in 24 hours.

Relatives, political and religious leaders from across the world have begged for the release of the four Christian activists, a German mother, a French engineer and an American who have gone missing in Iraq in the past two weeks.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw stepped up an appeal for the release of four Christian hostages.

Susanne Osthoff, a Muslim convert who was doing aid work, was snatched in northern Iraq on November 25 with her local driver.

France is also battling to secure the release of engineer, Bernard Planche kidnapped at gunpoint in Baghdad on Monday by three gunmen and a woman.

Despite growing calls around the world to pull foreign troops out of Iraq, the US-led coalition received a boost when Japan extended its military mission for another year with an eye to withdrawing in 2006.—AFP