The scenes of bodies being pulled from the flames, kicked, battered and dismembered were deemed too gruesome to be shown on television in Europe. Lara Marlowe reports from Baghdad
Only the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera showed a close-up of one of at least four Western civilians murdered in Fallujah, 50km from Baghdad, yesterday.
Five US soldiers from the First Infantry Division were also killed yesterday morning in the same area when a bomb exploded beneath their vehicle.
It was the worst day for US occupation forces since January 8th, when a US military helicopter was shot down near Fallujah, killing nine men.
Iraqi cameramen working for Reuters and AP television news filmed the aftermath of the particularly brutal attack on two four-wheel drive vehicles, one red, one white, on the main boulevard through Fallujah not far from the town hall.
"The mujaheddin attacked the cars," a young man says on the APTN tape. "They threw two hand grenades at each car and dragged the occupants out. Four of them were Americans."
A US military spokesman confirmed that four civilian contractors employed by the Coalition Provisional Authority were killed.
Eye witnesses in Fallujah told an Iraqi source there that six men and two women were riding in the two vehicles. Some reports mentioned a third vehicle in the convoy which evacuated other dead or wounded.
The videotape shows a man lying on the asphalt, a white shirt raised above his stomach, his charred arms held in an arc, as if trying to protect himself or begging for mercy.
Another body is pulled out in front of the camera and beaten with pipes. A man kicks the head, which detaches from the corpse. The bodies are hacked with shovels.
A frenzied crowd shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is great), "Down with the occupation, down with America," "Long live Islam," and "Fallujah is ours."
Some of the young men covered their faces so they could not be identified. "Fallujah will be the cemetery of the Americans," predicted one man with a hidden face.
Men in the mob wrapped their own hands in cloth to avoid touching the burned flesh, then trussed up the charred corpses with yellow tape, attached them to the backs of cars and dragged them through the streets of Iraq's most rebellious town.
The videos also show a man holding up what appears to be a set of military "dog tags". A flak jacket and a blue US passport lie on the ground beside a body.
Two bodies, presumably the same two which were filmed, were later attached to the criss-crossed girders of a British-built former railway bridge across the Euphrates, on the edge of Fallujah.
The bodies were hung upside down. One was headless, and neither had hands or feet. While traffic continued across the bridge, an AFP correspondent saw locals throwing stones at the corpses.
An Iraqi-American photographer who arrived at the bridge after the bodies were cut down saw children stabbing the carbonised bodies with knives.
A local resident who had witnessed the killings told the photographer that two men were dragged from the vehicles pleading for their lives, but were doused with petrol and set alight.
A hand and a leg were strung from an electrical pole on the main street.
In recent weeks US missionaries were murdered in northern Iraq, and Finnish contractors were killed. The strategy appears to be based on the assumption that all Westerners are somehow connected with the occupation, and that attacking them will ensure that Iraq remains ungovernable.
Commenting on the murders at a press conference in Baghdad, Gen Mark Kimmitt, the second in command in Iraq, said, "Fallujah remains one of those cities in Iraq that just doesn't get it. It's a former Baathist stronghold."