BAGHDAD (AFP) - A team of Iraqi negotiators was preparing a last-ditch bid to avert a military assault on rebel-held Fallujah as foreign governments were faced with the kidnapping of more hostages by Islamic militants.
Iraqi forensic experts said an Asian man found shot dead in Iraq does not resemble a Japanese hostage threatened with execution by his kidnappers, while militants claimed to have snatched a Bangladeshi and a Sri Lankan lorry driver and another group paraded a Polish woman on television at gunpoint.
US researchers, meanwhile, estimated that around 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of last year's US-led war on Iraq, more than half of them from violence -- a claim that top US ally Britain pledged to study.
The daily chaos coupled with a scandal over hundreds of tonnes of missing explosives in Iraq has taken centre stage in the presidential race in the United States, with just four days to go until the vote.
The body of an Asian man found in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, did not look like a young Japanese hostage abducted earlier in the week, and had been dead for two days -- long before a deadline to execute Shosei Koda expired, forensic doctors who examined the corpse said.
Doctors said the man had been a lorry driver, according to papers found on him and was much older than the hostage, a 24-year-old backpacker from Japan.
He was paraded was on a video Tuesday by Islamic militants led by Iraq's most wanted man Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after being kidnapped reportedly while wandering around Baghdad.
The Al-Qaeda-linked group threatened to behead Koda unless Tokyo pulled its 600 troops out of Iraq by a Thursday evening deadline -- a demand flatly rejected by Japan.
The Japanese government, which went into emergency session after a report about the discovery of a bullet-riddled remains of an Asian man, remained hopeful that the tourist was still alive.
"Japan is acting on the assumption that he's still alive and we will continue our efforts to rescue him," Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said in Tokyo.
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were also scrambling to confirm claims that one of their nationals had been taken hostage in Iraq.
Al-Jazeera television said Thursday that two drivers, a Bangladeshi and a Sri Lankan, had been abducted by a group calling itself the Islamic Army of Iraq on their way to a US base in the country.
Militants, many claiming allegiance to the Jordanian-born Zarqawi, use foreign hostages as weapons to try to crack the US-led military coalition in Iraq.
They also pick-off members of the country's nascent security forces to erode public support for the US-backed interim government.
In the latest attack, the Al-Qaeda-linked Army of Ansar al-Sunna said it had killed 11 members of the Iraqi National Guard -- beheading one and shooting the others.
The group warned in a statement posted on a website that anyone "serving the crusaders and their puppet, the collaborator Iraqi government," would meet the same fate. The statement's authenticity could not be confirmed.
Desperate to end the violence, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and his allies have pledged to crush the insurgency in time for national elections promised by January -- by force if necesary -- setting their sites on wresting control of the rebel hub of Fallujah.
Officials on Friday said the premier would send a delegation from the interim parliament to the city, said to be an operating base used by Zarqawi, to discuss clearing up insurgents and heavy weapons in a last-ditch bid to avert a military offensive.
The comments came as some 1,000 US and Iraqi troops who have encircled the city for more than two weeks, said they were prepared for action if ordered.
In separate developments, Britain said it would study research published in the British medical weekly The Lancet by experts from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore that said around 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of last year's invasion.
Australia, another founding member of the US-led coalition however, defended the war and said it was unsure of the accuracy of the data.
Another dark cloud hung over Washington's decision to invade Iraq -- a central theme in speeches by President George W. Bush and White House hopeful John Kerry as they push on with the final days of campaigning ahead of the elections on November 2 -- with the revelation of missing explosives.
The Pentagon Thursday released an aerial photograph of the Iraqi facility where hundreds of tonnes of powerful explosives have disappeared, showing two trucks parked by a bunker just before the US-led invasion.
Meanwhile, one Iraqi was killed and five people wounded, including two US soldiers, in a car bomb attack on a US military convoy in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a US army spokeswoman said.
And a deputy governor of Diyalah province in eastern Iraq, was shot dead by unknown attackers, police said.
10/29/2004 - 15:37 GMT - AFP