BAGHDAD, 19 September 2004 — Kidnappers of two Americans and a Briton yesterday threatened to behead them unless Iraqi women held at two American-controlled detention facilities were freed within 48 hours. A separate group holding two French journalists said they were freeing them conditionally. In continuing violence, a suicide car bomb attack on Iraqi security forces in the northern town of Kirkuk killed at least 23 people.

Al-Jazeera television broadcast a videotape from Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal Jihad group, showing Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong and Briton Kenneth Bigley.

The men appeared unharmed, sitting on the floor with heads slightly bowed and white blindfolds covering their eyes. Each identified himself and repeated: “My job consists of installing and furnishing camps at Taji base.” At one point, a militant’s rifle pointed down at the head of the man who identified himself as Hensley.

A masked militant dressed in black stood behind the men and read from a statement claiming to be from Tawhid wal Jihad. He accused Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of enabling “infidel foreigners” to “violate the honor of Muslim women, humiliate people and suck up the riches of the country” and gave the United States and Britain 48 hours to release Iraqi women detained at Abu Ghraib and Umm Qasr prisons.

If the demand is not met, the speaker warned: “By the name of God, these three hostages will get nothing from us except their throats slit and necks chopped, so they will serve as an example.”

Both the named facilities are run by American forces. Umm Qasr is in British-controlled southern Iraq, and Abu Ghraib is a prison near Baghdad where US soldiers were photographed sexually humiliating male prisoners. Fears about the safety of women inmates have multiplied since then.

Meanwhile, the Islam Memo website quoted a message from the Islamic Army in Iraq as saying that the kidnapped French journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, had “willingly agreed” to work for it to inform the West about the realities of the US-led war and the “truth” about the Iraqi resistance. “The Islamic Army in Iraq... has ended the imprisonment of two French journalists,” the site quoted the statement as saying. “They are now conducting their work in agreement with the Islamic Army and it was agreed (that) they work for the army to cover battles and attacks... for a limited period which has not been announced,” the message was quoted as saying.

In Paris, a government spokesman said France was studying the message. “It is premature to say whether or not this statement is authentic. We are analyzing it,” the spokesman said.

Yet another group kidnapped 10 employees of a US-Turkish company and threatened to kill them if the company does not withdraw from Iraq within three days. Al-Jazeera showed a videotape issued by the Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq Battalions showing 10 men sitting on the ground and holding up their identification papers, in front of masked armed captors. The hostages appeared to be from the Middle East.

In the third major suicide attack this week against Iraq’s beleaguered security forces, a car bomber killed at least 23 people outside the headquarters of the Iraqi National Guard in Kirkuk, hospital officials said. The bomb ripped through a crowd of people waiting to apply for jobs at the offices in Kirkuk, 250 km north of Baghdad. Iraqis queuing up to join the country’s security forces have repeatedly been targeted by guerrillas.

Body parts, shoes and debris littered the dirt road outside the headquarters. Firefighters doused flames from a mangled car, and ambulances ferried the wounded to hospital.

In Baghdad, a car bomb killed two American soldiers and wounded eight, the US military said. The soldiers were on their way to the site of a previous car bomb explosion when they were attacked. Three US vehicles were destroyed in the blast.

— Additional input from agencies