NAJAF, Iraq, Aug 8 (AFP) - Iraq`s Prime Minister Iyad Allawi made a surprise visit to Najaf on Sunday, a day after extending an olive branch to radical cleric Moqtada Sadr whose Shiite Muslim militia holds parts of the holy city.
Also Sunday, a diplomatic row between Iraq and Iran took a dangerous turn with the kidnapping in the central city of Karbala of an Iranian consul accused by his abductors of stirring sectarian strife.
Allawi, accompanied by his interior and defense ministers and Muwafaq al-Rubaie, the country`s national security adviser, issued a fresh call to militiamen to leave Najaf.
"The outlaws have to lay down their weapons and leave the city`s holy sites including the Imam Ali shrine," sacred to Shiites, he said.
Sadr`s Mehdi Army militiamen are holed up in the shrine area and the vast cemetery in Najaf, which was largely calm Sunday after three days of fierce fighting with US and Iraqi government forces.
Allawi had said Saturday that most of those fighting in Najaf were criminals with no connection to Sadr and he invited the young firebrand cleric to run in elections planned by January 2005.
In another sign of reconciliation with Sadr, Allawi said some Mehdi Army militiamen would qualify for a limited 30-day amnesty he offered Saturday for those who had committed "minor crimes."
It was unclear how the amnesty would be implemented and whether it would cover several high-ranking former regime elements still at large or any of the 5,000 people being held without trial in US-run prisons at Abu Ghraib near Baghdad and Camp Bucca in the south.
The government is hoping the amnesty will quell the insurgency which has shown no signs of abating 16 months after the fall of Saddam Hussein`s regime.
Meanwhile, in the latest blow to relations between Baghdad and Tehran, an Islamic group in the central Iraqi city of Karbala that it has "detained" the Iranian consul, which Iranian state television later confirmed.
The Islamic Army in Iraq, in a statement read by Al-Arabiya television, said Faridoon Jahani was "detained for stirring sectarian strife and for activities outside his duties".
Iran`s foreign ministry also said it was summoning Iraq`s top diplomat in Tehran over Iraqi claims that four Iranian spies have been arrested in Baghdad.
It also snubbed a call from Iraq`s interim defense minister Hazem al-Shaalan for Tehran to immediately return Iraqi planes sent to Iran before or during the 1991 Gulf War.
Tehran has insisted that it was holding only 22 Iraqi planes which Saddam`s regime sent to Iran to avoid attacks by US-led forces liberating Kuwait and that it was ready to return them if asked by the United Nations.
Also Sunday, Iraq reinstated the death penalty for murderers and those threatening national security, government spokesman Gurgis Sada told AFP.
"Yesterday we announced an amnesty. Today the death penalty. Choose one of them," he said, speaking to insurgents.
Capital punishment, which had been in force under the former regime of Saddam Hussein, was abolished by the previous US-led occupation authority.
Many Iraqis had demanded that Saddam and other top figures of the old regime, charged with committing crimes against humanity and war crimes, be executed.
Meanwhile the health ministry said that 50 people were killed and 300 injured in bloodshed throughout the country over the past 24 hours.
A seven-year-old Iraqi child was killed and three others aged five to 10 were injured Sunday when they stepped on a roadside bomb on the way to a playground in the northern city of Kirkuk, police said.
West of Kirkuk, the body of a Kurdish businessman was found stabbed to death in the predominantly Arab town of Al-Riad, west of the city, police said.
An Iraqi national guardsman also died and another was injured late Saturday as security forces attempted to defuse a roadside bomb near Kanaan village southeast of Baquba, another guardsman said.
Attacks on Iraqi police and national guardsmen are frequent around the restive city, 60 kilometers (about 35 miles) northeast of Baghdad. A suicide car bombing on a police station in Baquba`s centre at the end of June killed 70 people, mostly police recruits.
In Iraq`s hostage crisis, meanwhile, the families of three kidnapped Indians waited anxiously as insurgents reportedly made new demands to release seven hostages in a blow to hopes of a breakthrough in their three-week-old ordeal.
The truckers` Kuwait-based employer said they had learned of an unspecified fresh demand from the abductors, who had originally ordered the company to pull out of Iraq.
Also Sunday the family of a Turkish trucker abducted Thursday pleaded for his kidnappers to let him go since their demands for his firm to stop operating in Iraq had been met.
The trucker`s kidnappers threatened to behead him within 48 hours. His employer, a company called Atahan Lojistik, then said it was suspending all operations in Iraq and wanted its driver freed safely.