BAGHDAD (AFP) - The threat of execution hung over a British 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.
The spectre of inter-confessional strife loomed over the war-torn country after two senior Sunni Muslim clerics were assassinated in Baghdad in less than 24 hours.
Despite the 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.
Even so, in an interview with an Arabic newspaper, Allawi underlined the precarious situation in Iraq, revealing 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.
Blair restated his determination to "stand firm" in Iraq, as the fate of the three foreign contractors taken at gunpoint from their posh Baghdad home on Thursday hung in the balance.
The two-day deadline set by loyalists of suspected Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi expired Monday for the coalition to release Iraqi women from prison or see Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong and British engineer Kenneth Bigley executed.
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 the US-led coalition since last year's invasion and has become a no-go zone for ground troops.
An American soldier was killed near the northern oil centre of Kirkuk, the military said in a statement, raising the death toll past 1,032.
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 its January target for elections despite the bloodshed, and called on the United Nations to help make them a success.
The abductions of the three Westerners were just one of several hostage crises in Iraq where Sunni Arab insurgents in particular have adopted kidnappings as a favoured tactic.
A rare kidnapping by Shiite militants ended bloodlessly Monday. Eighteen Iraqi national guardmen, who had been threatened with death in retaliation for the arrest of a key lieutenant of radical leader Moqtada Sadr, were freed by their captors, a Sadr aide said.
A Turkish company confirmed that 10 of its employees had been taken hostage, but declined to say whether it would end its Iraq operations to save their lives.
A Turkish truck driver was killed and another wounded in the main northern city of Mosul, while in a separate ambush another four Turks -- two journalists and two aid workers -- were injured, police and Turkish diplomats said.
Three Lebanese and their Iraqi driver were also reported missing.
The spectre of inter-faith strife loomed large as the leading Sunni clerics' organization announced the assassinations of two of its members in Baghdad.
The exact circumstances of their deaths remained unclear, but one was the prayer leader at an isolated Sunni mosque in the overwhelmingly Shiite neighbourhood of Sadr City.
Sunni leaders did not immediately apportion blame for the killings but they threatened to fan tensions between the ousted Sunni Arab elite and Iraq's Shiite majority.
In the Shiite heartland south of the capital, a security official for one of the community's two mainstream religious parties -- the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq -- was assassinated, a party spokesman said.
He was the second official of the faction's former military wing 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 a US military base were found near Mosul Monday, police said.
Three Iraqi national guardsmen were seriously injured near Baiji overnight when US soldiers mistakenly opened fire on them, one of their colleagues said.
And three insurgents were killed when their bomb-laden car apparently blew up prematurely in Mosul, police said.