Iraq, Saudi Arabia Restore Ties, Two Hostages Executed, Aircraft Strike House In Fallujah

BAGHDAD, July 30 (AFP) - Saudi Arabia and Iraq restored diplomatic ties Thursday after a 13-year hiatus, as militants executed two hostages and threatened a third and unidentified warplanes struck a house in Fallujah.
A national conference billed as a milestone towards democracy in Iraq was meanwhile postponed from Saturday to mid-August at the request of the UN, which said it wanted more time to involve groups reluctant to attend, officials said.
NATO diplomats failed to resolve differences over the alliance's pledge to train Iraqi security forces, but officials said a breakthrough could come on Friday.
As Iraq's hostage crisis deepened, a shocked Pakistan condemned the decapitation of two of its nationals. President Pervez Musharraf called the killings a crime against humanity that had damaged Islam.
Hours later, videotapes aired by Arab television stations claimed four Jordanians and a Somali being held by two separate groups in Iraq.
Other footage aired by private Indian network NDTV showed a gun trained on one of three Indian truckers being held with three Kenyans and an Egyptian at an undisclosed location.
In a statement sent to AFP, their abductors threatened to kill one of the Indians unless his Kuwaiti employer quits the country.
"We will slit the throat of one of the hostages on Friday at 7:00 pm (1500 GMT) if our demands are not met," said the statement.
Organizers of the national conference of some 1,000 delegates to have opened Saturday said the two-week postponement requested by the UN was unrelated to the worsening security situation in Iraq, where more than 120 people died Wednesday in bombings and attacks.
In Saudi Arabia, after a visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the two sides said in a joint statement they had agreed to restore diplomatic ties and "develop their cooperation in the security field with an exchange of expertise."
Relations were broken off by the regime of then president Saddam Hussein during the 1990-1991 Gulf war, when US-led multinational forces used Saudi Arabia as a staging area for a massive invasion to free neighbouring Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.
In Tunis, three Arab foreign ministers wound up secret talks on sending Arab and Muslim security forces into Iraq to protect a new UN mission in Baghdad.
An Arab source said Iraqi interim Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari appealed to ministers from Algeria, Tunisia and Bahrein to send troops with the aim of bringing stability to his country.
The meeting was the first since the establishment of the "troika" of countries set up to examine the Iraqi situation at an Arab summit in Tunis at the end of May, when Arab League members refused to send forces to a country under US-led occupation.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was in Saudi Arabia Thursday, welcomed the idea of dispatching Arab or Muslim troops to Iraq, in addition to the thousands of foreign troops already there.
At a joint news conference with Allawi in Jeddah, Powell hailed what he called a "welcome idea from the Saudi government as to how to generate additional Muslim forces to participate in the work in Iraq."
But a group affiliated with alleged al-Qaeda militant Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi said it would attack any Arab or Muslim forces sent to Iraq.
"The Saudi and Pakistani governments...are seeking to send Muslim troops to Iraq in order to please their Jewish and Christian masters," said a statement by a branch of the Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Unification and Holy War) group posted on an Islamic website.
In Iraq, warplanes whose nationality could not be immediately determined struck a house in the flashpoint city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, residents said.
"I heard a very powerful explosion around 10:30 pm (1830 GMT) coming from the Shuhada neighbourhood," said a resident.
A US military spokesman in Baghdad said he was unaware of the involvement of any US aircraft in attacks in Fallujah.
Over the past month, the US military has conducted at least seven air strikes, mostly in southern Fallujah, on suspected hideouts of Zarqawi loyalists.
On the ground in Iraq, a US soldier died of wounds sustained in an attack near the town of Hawija, a hotbed of Sunni Muslim insurgents, in northern Iraq, the US military said.
An Iraqi border guard was also killed when his convoy was ambushed near the Iranian border, an Iraqi military official said, as Italian troops briefly exchanged fire with insurgents in southern Iraq.
In Brussels, NATO members France and the United States remained at odds over who would command an allied training mission to Iraq, but officials said they were hopeful of a compromise on Friday even though there was no clear sign of what would produce such a compromise.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization had agreed in principle at a summit in Istanbul last month to train Iraqi forces after the handover of powers to Baghdad from the US-led coalition.
But they left details to be hammered out, and France and other countries are battling with Washington over the details, officials said.