BAGHDAD (AFP) - The threat of execution hung over a Briton and two American hostages as their Islamic militant captors' 48-hour deadline for the US-led coalition to free all Iraqi female detainees was due to expire.
In Baghdad, a senior Sunni Muslim cleric was assassinated late Sunday in the Shiite slum of Sadr City, sending tremors through the country's religious communities.
Despite the rampant violence overwhelming the country, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, meeting his British counterpart Tony Blair in London, vowed he would not let the spiralling bloodshed upset plans for January elections.
But in an interview with an Arabic newspaper published Monday, Allawi revealed that he himself had escaped four attempts on his life since his government took over from the US-led occupation on June 28, the last one just five days ago.
US and British officials were silent Monday about the fate of the three foreign contractors taken at gunpoint from their posh Baghdad home last Thursday.
Purported loyalists of suspected Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi served a two-day deadline on Saturday to release Iraqi women from prison or see Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene "Jack" Armstrong and British engineer Kenneth Bigley executed.
The US military has said only two Iraqi women, both of them high-security detainees believed to have been instrumental in Saddam Hussein's alleged biological weapons programmes, were being held in the country.
Britain's Foreign Office on Sunday launched a televised appeal on an Arab satellite channel for Iraqis to help rescue the hostages.
"We are looking for any information that could help bring about the release of Kenneth," Foreign Office spokesman Dean McLoughlin said in Arabic on Al-Arabiya.
In London, Allawi, who was due to leave for Washington Monday, 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.
Both he and Blair -- the top US ally in the war on Iraq -- also said their governments were working closely together to try to free the hostages.
The abductions were just one of several hostage crises in Iraq where militants have made kidnapping a political weapon of choice.
An Iraqi militant group paraded 18 captive national guardsmen in video footage aired by Al-Jazeera television Sunday with a threat to execute them in 48 hours if a Shiite radical militia commander is not released.
Calling itself the Mohammed bin Abdullah Brigade, the group demanded the immediate release of Hazem al-Araji, representative of Shiite radical leader Moqtada Sadr for the Baghdad pilgrimage district of Kadhimiya, the television reported.
Separately, the Al-Qaeda-linked group Ansar al-Sunna claimed to have executed three Kurdish soldiers taken hostage in Taji, north of Baghdad, in a statement posted on an Islamist website.
Poor-quality video footage attached to the statement showed the three young men making brief comments, apparently identifying themselves, before their throats were slit and heads placed on top of their torsos.
Police in the northern city of Kirkuk said about a dozen Turkish truck drivers had been either killed or abducted in insurgent strongholds north of Baghdad over the past 24 hours. Three Lebanese and their Iraqi driver were also reported missing.
Fears of religious violence surfaced with the killing late Sunday of a senior Sunni cleric Sheikh Hazem al-Zaidi, who belongs to the influential Committee of Sunni Muslim Scholars.
Zaidi was abducted late Sunday along with two companions outside his al-Sajad mosque, an isolated Sunni place of worship in Sadr City, said the committee's spokesman Muthana Harirh al-Dari.
The assassination of a member of the committee, which represents 3,000 Sunni Muslim mosques across Iraq, could further enflame the aggrieved religious community. Disgruntled Sunnis, lavished with privileges under Saddam Hussein, have formed the backbone of the year-and-half-old insurgency in Iraq.
Bloodshed -- which has already claimed more than 400 lives this month -- showed no signs of abating as an Iraqi male was killed and his wife and son seriously wounded by a roadside bomb near the oil refinery town of Baiji, north of Baghdad.
The blast was meant for a US military convoy, police said.
Bullet-riddled corpses of two Iraqis who worked on the US military base were found near the northern city of Mosul on Monday, police said.
Three Iraqi national guardsmen around Baiji were seriously injured overnight when US soldiers mistakenly opened fire on them, said a member of the Iraqi national guard.
In addition, a rocket and small arms attack on a chemical factory in the area wounded three security guards.