IRAQ:A suicide bomber killed up to 20 men and injured at least 20 others queuing at a police recruitment centre west of Baghdad yesterday, police said, and al-Qaeda militants battled a rival Sunni Arab faction in the south of the capital.
The deaths of three more US soldiers were announced on the last day of May, already the deadliest month for US forces in more than two years. A total of 3,473 have died since the US-led invasion in 2003, 122 of them in May.
The Iraqi government said it was working closely with British authorities to secure the release of five Britons kidnapped on Tuesday in a raid blamed on the al-Mahdi army militia of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
"The government condemns this crime and is doing all it can to ensure the immediate release of the kidnapped Britons," it said.
Lieut-Gen Raymond Odierno, deputy US commander in Iraq, said US troops continued to search for the Britons. "We are doing everything we can. We treat any coalition partner like we do a US soldier that was kidnapped," he said.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi husband and wife who work for the US embassy in Baghdad are missing and appear to have been kidnapped, US officials said yesterday. They said that after the husband went missing late last week, his wife went to look for him and then she, too, appeared to have been abducted.
US state department spokes- man Tom Casey said only that two local embassy employees were missing and that US and Iraqi forces are trying to find out what happened to them. - (Reuters)