BAGHDAD, 11 April 2004 — A wave of hostage-taking in Iraq dramatically increased pressure on the US and British occupation authorities Friday, with a wounded American being shown off on television and the clock counting down for three Japanese civilians whose captors have threatened to burn them alive.

More than a dozen foreign civilians were known to be held hostage last night, and at least three more are missing, including a British contractor, 37-year-old Gary Teeley, who disappeared in the southern town of Nassiriyah on Thursday. The German Foreign Ministry said yesterday that two of its security officials had gone missing while traveling from Jordan to the German embassy in Baghdad.

A group calling itself the Martyr Ahmed Yassin Brigades claimed in a video to have 30 hostages from countries including the US, Japan, Israel, Bulgaria, Spain and South Korea. None was shown in the video, and there was no way to verify the group’s claims. But an Australian TV crew interviewed a prisoner who spoke with an American accent, possibly a civilian truck driver or guard, who was sitting in a car beside a masked gunman.

The man, who gave his name as Thomas Hamill, had a bandage on his arm and blood and dirt on his jeans. He told the crew that he was seized after a convoy was attacked near the airport on Friday. His captors then drove him off along the main highway between Baghdad and Fallujah. He appeared to be one of a number of contract workers, as well as two US troops, described by the Pentagon as unaccounted for from attacks on Friday.

Also held are two aid workers kidnapped in Najaf: Fadi Ihsan Fadel, a Syrian-born Canadian who works for the International Rescue Committee, and Nabil Razouk, 30, an Arab from East Jerusalem who works for the US Agency for International Development. The group holding them claims they are Israeli spies.

US Vice President, Dick Cheney, arrived in Japan Friday amid a crisis over the threatened execution tonight of the three Japanese hostages in Iraq —Noriaki Imai, who had planned to look into the effects of depleted-uranium weapons, a female aid worker, Nahoko Takato, and a freelance journalist, Soichiro Koriyama. Cheney was expected to urge the embattled Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to stand firm.

The plight of foreign hostages in Iraq is deepening the crisis facing Tony Blair and George W. Bush as they meet in Washington later this week. Heavy fighting with both Sunni and Shiite fighters has sharply increased American troop losses, while Iraqi leaders supporting the US occupation denounced the assault on Fallujah, where some 1,500 civilians have been killed or wounded.

The US offered a truce to fighters in Fallujah Friday, but earlier attempts to bring an end to the siege of the city of 300,000 people have failed.

There were further ambushes of US convoys Friday on the road from Baghdad. In one attack a tank was set on fire by a rocket-propelled grenade, which locals said was fired by a 10-year-old boy. In another, a roadside bomb destroyed a truck, which blazed on the road near Baghdad International Airport.

In Adhamiyah, a large Sunni district in Baghdad, dozens of young men, their faces masked with Arab headdresses, attacked police stations and shot at US troops. A US airman was killed and two were wounded in a mortar attack on an airbase at Balad, north of Baghdad, the military said. More than 40 Iraqis were reported dead in fighting around Baghdad.

The US has come under intense pressure from its own Iraqi allies not to storm Fallujah. The US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council issued a statement criticizing “military solutions and the policy of collective punishment that has fallen on innocent civilians”.

The director of Fallujah’s main hospital, in reality a single-storey building with very limited facilities, said on Friday that 450 people had been killed and 1,000 wounded during the US Marines’ Operation Vigilant Resolve. At least 51 US and allied soldiers have been killed in the last week.

The offer of a truce by the US in Fallujah has evidently come because of the ever-increasing isolation of the coalition within Iraq. The siege has led to a wave of anti-US sentiment, provoking demonstrations and attacks throughout the country.

The US also seems to be having second thoughts about its confrontation with Moqtada Al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric, and his Mehdi Army. It has threatened to attack him in Najaf. Sadr, for his part, has told his men not to shoot even if shot at.