BAGHDAD (AFP) - A second corpse dressed in an orange jumpsuit was found in the Tigris River as Philippine troops were to begin leaving the country to save the life of a Filipino hostage.
Iraqi police, who discovered the corpse with its throat slit near the northern city of Mosul, refused to speculate whether it was linked to a hostage drama in the area following the beheading of a Bulgarian captive and threatened killing of his colleague earlier in the week.
Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi on Thursday predicted more troubled days before stability returns to Iraq, where a seething insurgency has claimed the lives of thousands of civilians and hundreds of US soldiers in the past 15 months since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.
"The path ahead is long and there are a lot of difficulties and challenges," the premier told a news conference in the capital.
"But we are determined with the help of God to win this challenge," said Allawi, who took control of an interim Iraqi government on June 28.
"We are serious about facing these deviants and providing security and essential needs for the Iraqi people," he added, before unveiling plans for a new intelligence-gathering unit that will form part of a hardline drive to crack down on criminal gangs, rebels and foreign terror groups in the country.
The General Security Directorate (GSD) will aim to prevent the deadly stream of attacks plaguing Iraq.
The last two days have seen two car bombings, one outside the government's main compound in Baghdad and another targeting a police station west of the capital, that left at least 20 dead and more than 60 wounded.
The final touches are also being made to an amnesty for those who rebelled against the US-led coalition but are willing to lay down their arms, which will be announced soon, the prime minister said.
Last week Allawi's government took its first major policy step to counter the rebellion since taking office by passing a new security law giving Allawi a raft of powers to impose curfews, arrest suspects and ban political groups, among other tough measures.
Although the premier has yet to flex these new legislative muscles, Allawi is determined to prove to a sceptical public as well as the outside world that his administration has the ablity to restore order to the war-weary country.
Meanwhile, the hostage crisis that has tormented Iraq since April refused to abate as relatives and friends of one of the latest foreign nationals to go missing -- a Filipino -- waited anxiously for news.
To the anger of the United States and against the wishes of Iraq, Manila said it would start pulling its 51 soldiers and police from the country to save truckdriver Angelo de la Cruz, kidnapped last week by militants who threatened to behead him.
And Iraqi police said they have retrieved a second corpse, described as a Westerner, dressed in an orange jumpsuit from the Tigris River near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, 370 kilometres (230 miles) north of Baghdad.
"A corpse with its throat cut, dressed in an orange outfit, was found in the early hours of the morning by a police patrol floating about 20 kilometres (13 miles) south of Mosul," said police General Salem Haj Issa.
"The body was handed over to the Americans," he said. The US army had no immediate information on the report.
A handful of foreigners taken hostage in Iraq were dressed in orange outfits similar to those worn by prisoners at the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and then slain by their captors.
The finding followed the retrieval from the same river on Wednesday evening of a headless corpse also wearing an orange outfit who has yet to be identified.
In the latest hostage atrocity, the captors of a Bulgarian truckdriver announced Tuesday that he had been beheaded.
The Bulgarian government confirmed the death of a man. He is believed to be Georgy Lazov, 30, but his identity has not been confirmed.
The kidnappers had threatened to kill the other Bulgarian hostage by Wednesday evening unless US forces released Iraqi prisoners they are holding within 24 hours, Al-Jazeera satellite television said. His fate is unknown.
In addition, the employer of a kidnapped Egyptian trucker has agreed to leave the country, but a million-dollar ransom for Sayed Mohammed Sayed al-Garbawi's release is still on offer.