Suicide attack in Iraq

Attacks and kidnappings have intensified as Marines step up pressure on Falluja and Ramadi before an expected offensive to retake rebel cities to enable elections to go ahead in January.

US warplanes hit Falluja, sending plumes of black smoke rising from the eastern edge of the city. Seven explosions shook the area and a hospital official said a woman was seriously wounded and a teenage girl lost one leg.

A roadside bomb killed a US soldier and wounded another at Salman PAK south of Baghdad, the military said. A suspected suicide bomber blew up his vehicle on the main road to Baghdad airport, killing an Iraqi security man and wounding seven civilians, witnesses and hospital staff said.

An Interior Ministry spokesman said river patrol police found three unidentified bodies under a bridge across the Tigris on Tuesday.

Al Jazeera said militants had beheaded three Iraqi National Guards that a previously unknown group accused of spying for US troops in Iraq and helping arrest insurgents.

The channel aired footage showing three men with a masked man behind them, but did not broadcast the beheadings. US Embassy said they had no word on the three bodies or on a US-Lebanese contractor named Radim Sadiq who was seized in Baghdad’s western suburb of Mansour on Tuesday.

Four Jordanian truck drivers were kidnapped in western Iraq on Tuesday, a Foreign Ministry official said. Another militant group said it beheaded an Iraqi officer in the northern city of Mosul and posted a video of the killing on its website.

Gunmen killed an Oil Ministry official, Hussein Ali, as he left his home in Baghdad, an Interior Ministry spokesman said. —Reuters