BAGHDAD (AFP) - A US warplane bombed the rebel city of Fallujah even as a team of Iraqi negotiators prepared a last-ditch bid to avert an all-out military assault, while governments scrambled for news of foreign hostages.
Militants said they snatched a Bangladeshi and a Sri Lankan lorry driver and another group paraded a Polish woman on television at gunpoint, but a seven-year-old Lebanese boy kidnapped and held for ransom was released.
The daily chaos -- coupled with a scandal over hundreds of tonnes of missing explosives in the country -- has taken centre stage in the US presidential race, with just four days to go until the vote.
A US warplane bombed a suspected weapons site in the Sunni Muslim bastion of Fallujah, west of the Iraqi capital, on Friday afternoon, a spokesman said.
"We destroyed the site and there was a large secondary explosion," said Major Francis Piccoli, adding that this indicated there had been munitions in the area.
Hospital sources said three people died in the attack and three were wounded.
The assault came as British troops began arriving at a new base southwest of Baghdad, where they are filling in for US forces being sent to fight insurgents.
The contingent of around 850 soldiers from the Black Watch regiment and support personnel began the move from their previous base in Iraq's relatively calm south.
At the same time, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has agreed to send a delegation of councilors from the interim parliament to Fallujah to try to find a peaceful solution to the standoff, said council member Ahmad al-Barrak.
But Allawi said "this would be the last attempt" at mediation before a possible military assault against the Sunni Muslim bastion, he told AFP.
Some 1,000 US and Iraqi troops have encircled the city for more than two weeks, and are prepared for action if ordered. "We have been gearing up for a major operation since April," said Piccoli.
Unable to fight US-led forces in the open, militants have turned to using foreign hostages as weapons to try to crack Iraq's military coalition.
Staunch US allies Tokyo and Warsaw, however, refused to bow to the demands of groups who have kidnapped a Japanese tourist and a Polish-Iraqi woman.
Japan was holding out hope that 24-year-old Shosei Koda was still alive after a deadline for his execution passed without word from the hostage-takers.
The government went into emergency session after the bullet-riddled remains of an Asian man were found in Tikrit, northern Iraq, but a forensic expert in the city said the body did not match the description of Koda.
"Japan is acting on the assumption that he's still alive and we will continue our efforts to rescue him," Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura told reporters in Tokyo.
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were also scrambling to confirm claims that one of their nationals had each 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.
Lebanon breathed a sigh of relief, however, as young Mohammad Abdel Ghani Hamad, whose parents have lived in Iraq for 30 years, was set free after his captors accepted a 2,000 dollar ransom, said his father Abdel Ghani Hamad.
The family, who had initially been asked for 150,000 dollars, planned to return to Lebanon after the week-long ordeal.
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.
A soldier from the army's 3rd Infantry Division has said he helped remove 200 tons of explosives, including plastic explosives, from an Iraqi weapons site from which high explosives have gone missing, a Pentagon spokesman said Friday.
Meanwhile, one Iraqi was killed and eight people wounded, including five US soldiers, in a double car bombing on US military convoys 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 - 18:18 GMT - AFP