BAGHDAD (AFP) - The threat of execution hung over a Briton and two American hostages as a 48-hour deadline set by their Islamic militant captors for the US-led coalition to free all Iraqi female detainees ran out.
And the spectre of inter-confessional strife loomed over the war-torn country after two senior Sunni Muslim clerics were assassinated in Baghdad over the past 24 hours.
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 early Saturday to release Iraqi women from prison or see Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong and British engineer Kenneth Bigley executed.
Blair`s office said the British government was "monitoring the situation very closely."
Bloodshed -- which has already claimed more than 400 lives this month -- showed no signs of abating as at least three people were killed in yet another US air raid on the militant stronghold of Fallujah, west of the capital witnesses said.
US warplanes launched a double attack on the northern entrance to the city, which has offered the toughest resistance to coalition troops since the end of the war last year and has become a no-go zone for US ground troops.
In London, Allawi, who was due to leave for Washington Monday after talks with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, pledged his government would stick to the timetable of holding elections in January despite the rocketing bloodshed, and called on the United Nations to help make them a success.
The abductions were just one of several hostage crises in Iraq where militants behind the year-and-a-half insurgency 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, a representative of Shiite radical leader Moqtada Sadr, the television reported.
Separately, another 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.
A Turkish company confirmed Monday that 10 of its employees in Iraq had been taken hostage, but declined to say whether it would pull out from the war-torn country to save their lives.
Three Lebanese and their Iraqi driver were also reported missing.
A spokesman for the Committee of Muslim Scholars in Iraq announced consecutively the assassinations of two of the organisation`s top clerics in Baghdad.
The exact circumstances of their death remained unclear, but one of them was an imam for an isolated Sunni mosque in the overwhelmingly Shiite slum of Sadr City.
Officials for the organisation -- the most influential Sunni authority in the country -- refrained from accusing any party for the killings.
But the assassinations of the two clerics, whose committee 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 insurgency in Iraq.
In Iraq`s Shiite heartland, a security official for one of the country`s two major Shiite parties -- the Supreme Council For Islamic Revolution In Iraq -- was assassinated, a SCIRI spokesman said.
He was the Badr Organisation`s second official to be killed in a week.
In other attacks, a man was killed and his wife and son seriously wounded by a roadside bomb near the oil refinery town of Baiji, north of Baghdad. Police said the bomb was meant for a US military convoy.
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, one of their colleagues said.