The Ansar al-Sunnah Army said it had beheaded one
and shot the 10 others. The 11 Iraqi National Guardsmen were captured on the
highway between Baghdad and Hillah.
"After investigating with them and (hearing) their confessions, it turned out
this group was responsible for guarding the Crusader American troops in
Radwaniya area and what's around it in southern Baghdad," a statement posted on
the web site said.
The group has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks and hostage
takings, including the slaying of 12 Nepalese who were taken hostage in August.
Also Thursday, Iraqi extremists in a videotape aired by Al-Jazeera television
showed what they said was a Polish woman hostage held in Iraq and demanded that
Poland remove all its troops from Iraq and that Iraqi female prisoners be
released.
Meanwhile, a different militant group claimed Thursday to have obtained a
large amount of explosives missing from a munitions depot facility in Iraq and
threatened to use them against foreign troops who invade Iraqi cities.
The new kidnapping drama came as deadline wound down for a Japanese hostage
who was shown in a video aired Tuesday saying his captors — said to be the
al-Qaida-linked militant group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — would behead him in 48
hours unless Japan withdraws its troops from Iraq, a demand Tokyo has rejected.
Also held since last week is humanitarian worker Margaret Hassan, an
Irish-British-Iraqi woman who appeared in a video broadcast on Al-Jazeera on
Wednesday pleading for Britain to act to save her life.
In new violence Thursday, a car bomb exploded Thursday in southern Baghdad,
killing a U.S. soldier and at least one Iraqi civilian and wounding two other
American soldiers, the U.S. military said. At least 1,109 members of the U.S.
military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according
to an Associated Press count.
The new hostage video showed a middle-aged woman with gray hair and dressed
in a polka-dotted blouse sitting in front of two masked gunmen, one of whom was
pointing a pistol at her head.
The kidnappers, who called themselves the Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Fundamentalist
Brigades, said the woman, who was not identified by name, was a Polish citizen
working with U.S. troops in Iraq.
Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman said the woman was a
longtime Iraq resident with Iraqi citizenship and was believed to have been
abducted Wednesday night from her home in Baghdad. Abdul-Rahman did not release
her name.
The woman's voice was not audible on the tape, but Al-Jazeera said the woman
called on Polish troops to leave the country and for U.S. and Iraqi authorities
to release all female detainees from the Abu Ghraib prison.
Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski vowed that Poland government would not
give in to the kidnappers' demands.
"The Polish government will not deal with fulfilling the demands of the
abductors," he said.
Poland commands some 6,000 troops from 15 nations — including some 2,400 from
Poland — in the Babil, Karbala and Wasit provinces.
Ahmed al-Sheikh, Al-Jazeera's editor-in-chief, said the kidnappers did not
mention a specific death threat or give a deadline. He would not say when or how
the station obtained the tape.
Japanese leaders were trying Thursday to win the realease of Shosei Koda, a
24-year-old Japanese tourist who appeared in a video Tuesday saying he would be
beheaded in 48 hours unless Japan pulled out of Iraq. No specific time for the
deadline's end Thursday was given.
Al-Zarqawi's terror group, al-Qaida in Iraq, claimed responsibility for
Koda's abduction.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who has rejected the demand, said his
government was "calling on other countries and those who sympathetic to Japan,
and the Iraqi people" to help.
"But it remains difficult to figure out the situation," Koizumi said. "Mr.
Koda is ... just an ordinary, curious young man, and we are really hoping for
his release."
A Japanese government envoy arrived early Thursday in Amman, Jordan, to
coordinate diplomatic efforts to free Koda.
Koda, who left Japan in January for a yearlong trip starting in New Zealand,
told people he met traveling that he wanted to go to Iraq to see the country.
Koda's father Masumi, 54, appealed for his son's life in a videotape aired
Wednesday by Al-Jazeera.
"What I want Shosei's kidnappers to understand is that he is not an activist
supporting the stay of the Japanese troops in Iraq nor the American policy
there," his father said.
Late Wednesday, Al-Jazeera aired a video showing Hassan, the kidnapped
director of CARE International in Iraq, who again pleaded with Britain to
withdraw its forces from Iraq even as some 800 British troops began deploying
toward the Baghdad area. She also asked for the release of Iraqi women hostages.
The soldiers of the Black Watch and the Queen's Dragoon Guards are expected
to assume security responsibility in areas close to the capital to relieve U.S.
troops who are preparing for a major assault on the insurgent stronghold of
Fallujah and other areas west and north of the capital.
Hassan, 59, is the most high-profile of more than 150 foreign hostages who
have been abducted in Iraq. At least 33 of the hostages have been killed.
No group has claimed responsibility in Hassan's abduction. But followers of
Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi made the same demand for the release of
female prisoners in the abduction of two Americans and a Briton last month. All
three were beheaded.
Prime Minister Tony Blair's decision to agree to the U.S. request for
redeployment is a politically sensitive one for the British leader, whose
popularity has plummeted because of his support for the Iraq war.
On Thursday, a separate armed group calling itself Al-Islam's Army Brigades,
Al-Karar Brigade, said it had coordinated with officers and soldiers of "the
American intelligence" to obtain a "huge amount of the explosives that were in
the al-Qaqaa facility."
The claim couldn't be independently verified. The speaker was surrounded by
masked, armed men standing in front of a black banner with the group's name on
it in the tape obtained by Associated Press Television News.
"We promise God and the Iraqi people that we will use it against the
occupation forces and those who cooperate with them in the event of these forces
threatening any Iraqi city," the man added.
Nearly 400 tons of conventional explosives have disappeared from the al-Qaqaa
facility south of Baghdad, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
