9 killed in Iraq violence

Iraqi militants have freed two Indonesian journalists taken hostage last week in a notoriously dangerous part of Iraq, Sunni Muslim authorities and Indonesian official said yesterday.

The two television reporters were freed in Ramadi, a rebel hotspot west of the capital in the so-called Sunni triangle, and were heading straight back to Jordan without passing through Baghdad, the sources said.

"The two Indonesians have been freed and will be transferred to the headquarters of the committee in Baghdad, where they will have the choice of going to their embassy or leaving Iraq," said a member of the Committee of Muslim Scholars, the country's leading Sunni organisation.

An Iraqi truck driver was killed overnight in an attack northeast of Baghdad on his convoy carrying equipment for the Iraqi army, police said. Two other drivers were missing.

A teacher at Baiji's Oil Institute, 200km north of Baghdad, died yesterday in a bomb attack, while an Iraqi soldier was killed in a mortar attack outside Samarra, also north of Baghdad, and an Iraqi civilian died in an attack on a chemist's, southeast of Samarra, security sources said.

In the northern city of Mosul, police Lieutenant Colonel Essam Fathi was shot dead as he left home, police said, and in the same city gunmen kidnapped Raeda Wazzan, a journalist working for a government-funded television station, along with her son, aged 10, a TV executive said.

An interior ministry source said that four people had died in separate attacks in the capital.

A group calling itself the "Horror Brigades" of the Islamic army in Iraq said it had kidnapped three subcontractors, including a Turk, working for the US military.

A statement handed out in several northern Iraqi cities said the "three unbelievers helping to build camps for the American infidels" would be executed "by virtue of God's judgement".

The text's authenticity could not be verified.