Eight Telecom Workers Snatched, U.S. Says Polls Could Exclude Lawless Areas

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Eight telecom employees became the latest victims of Iraq's kidnapping epidemic, as Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was adamant January polls remained on target although US officials warned that violence could exclude some provinces.
The fate of British engineer Kenneth Bigley, meanwhile, was still unknown on Friday, as well as of two Italian women aid workers seized earlier this month in the Iraqi capital.
London for its part stood firm and refused to negotiate with Bigley's Islamist captors despite heart-rending pleas from the hostage's family.
In the latest bloodshed in the capital, three people were killed and 14 wounded in an explosion on Palestine Street in central Baghdad, medics said. The cause of the blast was not immediately clear.
The blast was infront of a restaurant and a court house on the eastern bank of the Tigris River.
Two Egyptian engineers named as Mustafa Abdel Latif and Mahmud Turki, working for Egypt's telecom giant Orascom, were snatched at gunpoint from their central Baghdad office on Thursday night, an interior ministry spokesman said.
"Last night at 10:00 pm (1800 GMT), armed men in a BMW drove up to their offices in the Harithiya district and kidnapped them," the spokesman said Friday.
A foreign employee with Orascom said it was more likely they were taken from their home.
In addition, an expatriate employee with the company said he was informed Wednesday of the abduction earlier the same day of at least six maintenance workers for the firm, including four Egyptians.
Those kidnappings took place near the western town of Qaim on the Syrian border, he said.
The abductions were the latest of close to 150 kidnappings of foreigners reported in Iraq since April 2004. At least two Egyptians have been executed in recent weeks and two others captured and released.
Meanwhile, there was no word on the whereabouts of Bigley since the Al-Qaeda-linked group holding him released a video of the 62-year-old Englishman begging British Prime Minister Tony Blair to meet the demands of his captors.
A group of Iraqis started distributing 50,000 pamphlets with Bigley's picture in the upmarket Mansur neighbourhood of Baghdad where he was kidnapped last week, together with two US colleagues.
The Tawhid wal Jihad organisation headed by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi -- the most wanted man in Iraq -- already beheaded the two American constractors after the coalition refused to release the Iraqi women it detains.
US artillery and aircraft fire pounded southern sectors of the Iraqi rebel city of Fallujah on Friday, residents said. The military confirmed it had fired artillery at suspected insurgents but said there were no air strikes.
The US military has intensified its strikes on Fallujah this month, targeting suspected hideouts of the insurgency and Zarqawi.
The city poses the most serious obstacle to the holding of nationwide elections, but Allawi was adamant during his meetings with US officials in Washington on Thursday that the vote would go ahead as scheduled in January.
"I know that some have speculated, even doubted whether this (January election) date can be met," Allawi told US lawmakers. "So let me be absolutely clear. Elections will occur in Iraq on time in January because Iraqis want elections on time."
US President George W. Bush acknowledged that "terrorist violence may well escalate as the January elections draw near" and cautioned the Iraqi government and its allies against lowering their guard.
But US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was more explicit in formulating reservations over the likelihood of a full-fledged ballot in four months.
"Let's say you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country, but some places you couldn't, because the violence was too great," he said.
"Well, so be it," Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee, stressing more US troops may have to be sent to Iraq to provide security for the elections.
American officials in Baghdad have said that contingency plans exist which could effectively jettison the ballot in the restive Al-Anbar province west of Baghdad, which includes Fallujah and the hotspot of Ramadi.
The lawless pockets which have burgeoned across Iraq could also jeopardise the vote in several other provinces, including those with the unstable cities of Mosul, Kirkuk, Samarra, Baquba and Najaf.
Bush's Democrat rival in the November 2 US presidential election slammed Allawi for painting an unrealistically rosy picture of the situation in his homeland.
"I think the prime minister is obviously contradicting his own statement of a few days ago where he said the terrorists are pouring into the country," John Kerry said.
Foreign targets continued to come under fire Friday when mortar shells struck near the Italian embassy in Baghdad, witnesses said, wounding two Iraqi women.
Italy was a staunch supporter of the US supporter of the US-led invasion of Iraq and has some 3,000 troops stationed in the south of the war-torn country.
Two of its nationals, aid workers Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, were kidnapped more than two weeks ago and their fate remains shrouded in mystery as statements about their alleged execution posted on Islamic websites still have not been authenticated.