BAGHDAD (AFP) - A chilling ultimatum to kill two American hostages and a Briton ticked down as Britain and Iraq said they were working closely on efforts to secure their release from Al-Qaeda-linked militants.
Loyalists of Iraq's most wanted man, suspected Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, have purportedly served London and Washington with a 48-hour deadline to execute the hostages unless Iraqi women are released from two top-security prisons.
More than 400 Iraqis have been killed this month alone in an explosion of violence that the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and US-led forces appear powerless to control four months before scheduled general elections.
As Allawi was locked in security talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London, three people were killed and two wounded in the lawless insurgency bastion of Fallujah, in an attack that residents blamed on a US tank, medics said.
"Our governments are working closely on it," Blair told a press conference in London after their talks.
The Iraqi leader added: "We are trying our best working on the issue of hostages and hopefully we will achieve some good results."
Blair called on the international community to forget disagreements on the war and unite behind the terror engulfing an Iraq awash with suicide bombings and in the grip of the hostage ciris.
"Whatever the disagreements about the first conflict in Iraq to remove Saddam, in this conflict now taking place in Iraq this is the crucible in which the future of this global terrorism will be determined," Blair said.
"And either it will succeed and this terrorism will grow, or we will succeed, the Iraqi people will succeed and this global terrorism will be delivered a huge defeat," he said.
Allawi pledged his government would stick to the timetable of holding elections next January despite the rocketing bloodshed and called on the United Nations to help make them a success.
"We are definately going to stick to the timetable of the elections in January next year," Allawi said. "I call upon the United Nations to help us in providing whatever it takes in making the elections a success in Iraq."
In a videotape broadcast by Al-Jazeera early Saturday, Zarqawi militants said their American and British captives would be executed within 48 hours unless their governments bowed to their demands.
Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene "Jack" Armstrong and British engineer Kenneth Bigley were abducted by gunmen from their smart Baghdad home on Thursday.
The US military has said only two Iraqi women, both of them high-security detainees believed to have been instrumental in ousted dictator Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes, were being held in the country.
The Blair-Allawi meeting came half-way through the expected expiry of the grisly deadline.
But in stark contrast to the frenetic efforts of Paris and Rome to secure the release of two French reporters and two Italian aid workers still in captivity, British and US officials have been more cautious.
The British embassy in Baghdad would say only that "we have a good presence here looking into it" refusing to make any further comment. The American mission refused any comment.
A spokesman for the Committee of Muslim Scholars, which has called for the release of the French and Italians, said it had issued no public call for the trio's release, but said it opposed any harm against people trying to rebuild Iraq.
Instead, Hensley's wife Patty made a somber plea for mercy and the trio's release in a prepared statement addressed to the kidnappers and broadcast on CNN television.0
She said her husband was in Iraq to rebuild vital infrastructure including water systems, schools, electrical grids and a museum.
"He is one of the kindest, gentlest people who wanted to help and the last person in the world that I would have expected this to happen to. He has no military affiliations ... He's there to help the Iraqi people."
The two Italian female aid workers, abducted earlier this month, may also be in Zarqawi's hands, Rome's La Repubblica daily reported, quoting US intelligence.
Separately, Iraqi police sources said about a dozen Turkish truck drivers had been either killed or abducted in Sunni strongholds north of Baghdad over the past 24 hours. Three Lebanese and their Iraqi driver have also been reported missing.
Meanwhile, US marines ordered "terrorists" to surrender in Ramadi ahead of a threatened assault to crush insurgents in the lawless Iraqi city.
Panicked locals began to flee Ramadi after US marines drove through the lawless Sunni Muslim city, using loudspeakers to order all "terrorists" to surrender by 4:00 pm (1200 GMT) or face a crusing assault, an AFP reporter said.
Early Saturday, marines launched what they called Operation Hurricane II to hunt for illegal weapons and ammunition and to disrupt a "terrorist network" in the capital of the violence-wracked Al-Anbar province of western Iraq.
Further south, a child was killed in the Shiite Muslim city of Hilla, south of Baghdad, when a car bomb exploded, also wounding three adults, police said.