BAGHDAD - US forces said Monday they killed 75 rebels in a sweep near the Syrian border for Iraq's most wanted man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as the foreign hostage crisis deepened with claims by militants that they had abducted a Japanese national.
Al-Qaeda-linked group Ansar al-Sunna released identity card copies giving the hostage's name as Akihiko Saito and said he had been captured during a "fierce battle" in western Iraq.
There was no immediate word from the Japanese authorities and the authenticity of the internet statement from the militants could not be independently verfied.
But the groups had carried out murders of foreign hostages in the past, often releasing video footage of the killings on Islamist websites.
Meanwhile, the family of Australian hostage Douglas Wood pleaded publicly with his captors for him to be given emergency blood pressure, cholesterol and heart medicines.
The plea came just hours before the expiry of a deadline set by his kidnappers for Canberra to announce it was withdrawing its forces from the US-led coalition in Iraq.
The 63-year-old engineer "suffers from dangerous, life-threatening illnesses," said a statement in Arabic issued by the Australian embassy in Baghdad.
Earlier, Wood's relatives said they would make a generous charitable donation to help the people of Iraq.
Australia, which has 550 soldiers already stationed in Iraq and is sending 350 more, has rejected the captors' demands.
The US military said a joint air and ground operation had been launched in western Iraq to eliminate "terrorists and foreign fighters" from an area "known as a smuggling route and sanctuary for foreign fighters", north of the Euphrates River.
The commander of US forces in the Gulf, General John Abizaid, earlier this month accused Syria of ignoring US demands to stop foreign fighters crossing the border into Iraq.
US forces said 75 insurgents were killed in the first 24 hours of operations in the area believed to be a stronghold of Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda's frontman in Iraq.
But Zarqawi's group immediately denied that 75 had been killed and also denied any of its leaders had been arrested, in Internet statements posted Monday, contradicting reports from Iraqi officials that two senior members had been detained.
US forces said recently they nearly captured Zarqawi on February 20 when he just had time to jump out of a vehicle travelling between Hit and Haditha in the Euphrates Valley.
US forces did not say if they sustained any casualties in the desert sweep, but the military earlier said it lost eight soldiers over the weekend elsewhere in Iraq.
Amid the violence, Iraq's new government held its second meeting, a day after parliament approved the nomination of new ministers for the key portfolios of oil and defence.
The whole cabinet was sworn in a second time after Kurdish leaders complained that the text of the oath read by ministers last week had been stripped of a crucial reference to a "federal Iraq", as sought by the Kurds.
In other violence, nine Iraqis were killed and 17 wounded, as insurgents continued to strike at the fledgling security forces.
Four people were killed and nine wounded when a suicide bomber rammed his car into two police vehicles at a checkpoint in southwest Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.
Two more people were killed when a parked car exploded in the crowded southern business district of Dura, the official said.
In the key northern oil refinery town of Baiji, defence force chief Lieutenant Colonel Omar Dalaf al-Qaissy was gunned down by assassins, police said.
Further south, in the town of Ishaki, truck driver Sami Nazar Ali was killed in an attack on his convoy.
Just north of the capital, an Iraqi soldier was killed by a roadside bomb targeting a joint US-Iraqi convoy in Shabab village near Dujail, the army said. Four suspects were arrested.
Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani meanwhile called for an investigation into the murder of 14 Sunni Arabs amid accusations they had been killed by Shiites in a tit-for-tat killing, Interior Minister Bayan Baker Solagh told reporters.
The bodies of the 14 were found on wasteland near the Baghdad Shiite district of Sadr City Friday bearing signs of torture and summary execution.
The bodies of eight more civilians, believed to be Shiites from Sadr City, were discovered tortured and then executed south of Baghdad Monday in an area where Sunni insurgents operate, the Iraqi army and medics said.

05/09/2005 16:38 GMT